Due to strong electromechanical coupling, the piezoelectric materials have been widely used as transducers, sensors,
actuators in the area of smart structures and systems. The fracture analyses of piezoelectric materials play an important role
for the optimum design and prediction of reliable service life. Analytical solutions are only available in fracture of piezoelectric
materials with relatively simple boundary conditions and regular geometry. However, in practical applications, the
bounded geometry, the complex electromechanical loading conditions and material non-linearity require the application
of numerical methods as the boundary elements method (BEM), meshless method and finite elements method (FEM).
The BEM is particularly suited to cases where better accuracy is required for problems having stress concentrations or
where the domain of interest extends to infinity. However, the fracture analyses of piezoelectric materials were limited
[1–5] because of the unavailability of the fundamental solutions. The meshless method has also been proved to be a very
efficient and accurate tool for analyzing the fracture problem of piezoelectric solids. A variety of meshless methods were
developed and extended to the analyses of piezoelectric problems [6–10]. Although there are many discretization methods,
the computational efficiency is still a problem. The FEM which may be less accurate than both BEM and meshless methods
has been widely used in the fracture problems of piezoelectric materials [11–21]. The appearance and development of some
commercialized finite element software packages, such as ANSYS and ABAQUS, provide an effective investigation of defects
and cracks of piezoelectric materials [22,23]. In addition, many improved FEM has been developed such as the hybrid finite