Cylindrical crack vis a vis parallel crack pair: shielding, energetics and asymptotics

Fibrous materials often contain cylindrical cracks due to delamination along the matrix-fiber interface. It is instructive to analyse a cylindrical crack of length 2a and diameter 2h in a homogeneous medium and compare the results with those for a pair of parallel cracks of length 2a and spacing 2h. The pair of parallel cracks mutually shielding each other is examined here with regard to the variation of stress intensity factors and energetics including the asymptotic limit of a pair of nearly coalescing parallel cracks. A unified formulation for parallel cracks/cylindrical crack based on crack opening displacement (COD) in terms of Chebyshev polynomials is developed. The characteristic variation of stress intensity factors as the cracks approach each other (h → 0) shows that the stress intensity factors vanish for the case of a vanishingly small cylindrical crack but not for the 2D parallel pair of cracks. The 2D case of a pair of collapsing parallel cracks ensures a finite energy release rate asymptoting to that of a single crack. Further research is needed to establish definitive asymptotic bounds for the case of extremely closely spaced cracks on the lines of Hutchinson and Suo (Adv Appl Mech 29:377-384, 1992), Kachanov (1993) and Gorbatikh et al. (Int J Fract (Lett Fract Micromech), 143:377-384, 2007). Results are presented for different values of Poisson’s ratio.