A Unified Framework for Modeling Hysteresis in Ferroic Materials

This paper addresses the development of a unified framework for quantifying hysteresis and constitutive nonlinearities inherent to ferroelectric, ferromagnetic and ferroelastic materials. Because the mechanisms which produce hysteresis vary substantially at the microscopic level, it is more natural to initiate model development at the mesoscopic, or lattice, level where the materials share common energy properties along with analogous domain structures. In the first step of the model development, Helmholtz and Gibbs energy relations are combined with Boltzmann theory to construct mesoscopic models which quantify the local average polarization, magnetization and strains in ferroelectric, ferromagnetic and ferroelastic materials. In the second step of the development, stochastic homogenization techniques are invoked to construct unified macroscopic models for nonhomogeneous, polycrystalline compounds exhibiting nonuniform effective fields. The combination of energy analysis and homogenization techniques produces low-order models in which a number of parameters can be correlated with physical attributes of measured data. Furthermore, the development of a unified modeling framework applicable to a broad range of ferroic compounds facilitates material characterization, transducer development, and model-based control design. Attributes of the models are illustrated through comparison with piezoceramic, magnetostrictive and shape memory alloy data and prediction of material behavior.