A general unified treatment of lamellar inhomogeneities

Consider a lamellar inhomogeneity embedded in an unbounded isotropic elastic medium. When the elastic moduli of the lamellar inhomogeneity are zero it is a crack, if its elastic moduli are infinite it is an anticrack, and when its elastic moduli are finite it is called a quasicrack. Based on the Eshelby’s equivalent inclusion method (EIM), the present paper develops a unified approach for determination of the exact closed-form expressions for modes I, II, and III stress intensity factors (SIFs) at the tips of lamellar inhomogeneities under a remote applied polynomial loading.