Analysis of Variation of Stress Intensity Factor along Crack Front of Interacting Semi-Elliptical Surface Cracks

In this paper, a singular integral equation method is applied to calculate the distribution of stress intensity factor along crack front of two interacting 3-D semi-elliptial coplanar surface cracks. The stress field induced by the body force doublet in a semi-infinite body is used as the fundamental solution. Then, the problem is formulated as a system of integral equations with singularities of the form γ-3. In the numerical calculation, the unknown density of body force doublet is approximated by the product of fundamental density function and polynomial. The results show that the present method yields smooth variations of stress intensity factors along the crack front very accurately for various geometrical conditions.