Thermoelectric materials are materials that involve the coexistence of heat flux and electric current in the absence of magnetic field. In such materials, there is a coupling among electric potential and temperature gradients, causing the thermoelectric effects of Seebeck and Peltier. Those coupling effects make the design and analysis of thermoelectric materials complicated and sophisticated. The main aim of this work is dealing with thermoelectric materials with discontinuities. Since heat and electric fluxes are undefined at the crack tip and the temperature and electric fields across the crack surface are discontinuous, it is better to apply peridynamic (PD) theory to capture such details at the crack tips. Hence, we propose in this paper a PD theory which is suitable in tackling such discontinuities in thermal and electric fields. In this study, the continuum-based electrical potentials and temperature fields are written in the form of nonlocal integrals of the electrical potentials and temperature that are effective whether we have discontinuities or not. To illustrate the consistency of the peridynamic technique, a number of examples were presented and witnessed that PD results were in good agreement with those results from the literature, finite element solutions and analytical solutions.
Keywords: electric conduction; heat conduction; insulated crack; peridynamic theory; thermoelectricity.