Stress intensity factor for a planar interfacial crack in three dimensional bimaterials

In this paper, stress intensity factor for a three dimensional planar interfacial crack is considered on the idea of the body force method. The formulation leads to a system of singular integral equation, whose unknowns are three types of crack opening displacements. The unknown body force densities are approximated by the products of the fundamental density functions and power series ; here, the fundamental density functions are chosen to express singular stress fields due to a two-dimensional interface crack exactly. The calculation shows that the present method gives rapidly converging numerical solutions. It is found that the stress intensity factors KI and KII are determined by bimaterials constant ε alone, independent of elastic modulus ratio and Poisson's ratio.