Problem of interaction of thin rigid needle-shaped inclusions located between different elastic materials

Abstract

We study a piecewise-homogeneous elastic plane composed of two half-planes with different elastic parameters and two thin rigid needle-shaped inclusions located between them. One inclusion is rigidly connected with the environment, and the other inclusion is not, while contacting with it like a smooth rigid punch. We consider the plane deformed state generated by stresses given at infinity. The problem is reduced to a combination of a matrix Riemann boundary-value problem from the theory of analytic functions and a matrix Hilbert problem, which can be solved in terms of integrals through the reduction to two separate scalar Riemann boundary-value problems on a twosheeted Riemann surface.We explicitly obtain the complex potentials of the composite elastic plane, the stress intensity factors near the tips of the inclusion, and the rotation angles of the inclusions. We also present numerical examples illustrating how the stresses near the inclusions depend on the elastic and geometric parameters of the problem.