An internal crack in a half-plane solid with clamped boundary Original Research Article

An internal crack in a half-plane solid with clamped boundary is analyzed. A system of singular integral equations is derived for the material whose response is general anisotropic. Numerical method is then used to investigate the solutions to the system of equations. Results are presented for the stress intensity factors for orthotropic material. The effects of the orientation of the crack, the material angle and the degree of anisotropy are also discussed in some detail. In particular, when the crack is perpendicular to the clamped boundary and when one of the material principal axes is along the crack faces, our numerical analysis shows that the result for the stress intensity factor KI∗ under uniform pressure loading is exactly the same as that for KII∗ under uniform shear loading. Furthermore, these stress intensity factors are invariant under the 90 degrees of rotation of the material principal axes.