Effects of variation of material properties on the stress intensity factors of cracked anisotropic bodies

This paper presents a two-dimensional parametric study of the behavior of uniformly cooled homogeneous linear elastic anisotropic bodies containing cracks using the boundary element method (BEM). The present work investigates the effects of varying material properties, and varying orientation of these material properties, on the magnitude of the stress intensity factors (SIFs) of the cracked bodies. Three cracked plate geometries are considered in this study, namely: (1) a plate with an edge-crack; (2) a plate with a double edge-crack; (3) a plate with symmetric cracks emanating from a central hole. Where appropriate, finite element method (FEM) analyses are also performed in order to validate the results of the BEM analysis. The results of this study show that, for all crack geometries, the mode-I stress intensity factor, K-I(*) decreases as the anisotropy of the material properties is increased. Additionally, for all these cases, K-I(*) decreases as the angle of orientation of the material properties, theta, increases with respect to the horizontal axis. The results also show that BEM is an accurate and efficient method for two-dimensional thermoelastic fracture mechanics analysis of cracked anisotropic bodies.