ARBITRARY ARRAY OF CRACKS IN BONDED HALF-PLANES SUBJECTED TO VARIOUS LOADINGS

This paper is concerned with a general analysis of two bonded half planes containing an arbitrary array of cracks subjected to tension and shear at infinity. The analysis is based on the body force method, where body forces of symmetric and antisymmetric types are distributed along all the cracks, and their densities are determined from the boundary conditions. In numerical calculations, all the crack boundaries are divided into elements, and the traction-free conditions of the crack edges are replaced by the conditions in terms of the stress resultants of all the crack elements. This procedure has greatly improved the accuracy of the numerical results, and made the present analysis for distributed line cracks applicable to arbitrary kinked and branched cracks, just by joining adjacent cracks together. Numerical calculations are performed for various important problems, and the effects of geometric and mechanical parameters on the stress intensity factors are examined.