Near-field solutions for propagating cracks at the interface of dissimilar anisotropic elastic materials

Abstract

A complex variable formulation has been developed to describe the near-field state of stresses and displacements for a propagating crack along the interface of two dissimilar anisotropic materials. The formulation is general and can be reduced to all the subordinate cases. The crack can be propagating or stationary and the materials on each side of the crack can be anisotropic, orthotropic, isotropic, or even rigid. The near-field stresses contain the usual square root singularity and also the oscillatory behavior in the case of dissimilar materials. Due to the complexity of the problem it was not possible to use the conventional definitions of the stress intensity factors. Therefore a new definition is given. It is proportional to the coefficient of the lowest order term of the near-field state of stresses and, to within a multiplicative factor, reduces to previous definitions for subordinate cases.