Determination of complex stress intensity factors for interface cracks in bi-material specimens subjected to ununiform stresses

•FEA used to determine the complex SIFs for cracks in CCP/SECP bi-material specimens.•Several non-uniform normal and shear stress and bi-material pairs considered.•Mathematical forms of two complex weight functions for interface cracks formulated.•Determination of a specific WF is reduced to determination of unknown parameters .•This method is used to derive complex weight functions for CCP and SECP specimens. This paper presents the calculation of complex stress intensity factors (K) for interface cracks in commonly used bi-material specimens subjected to arbitrary ununiform stress fields. First, detailed finite element analyses were carried out for cracks in centre-cracked plate (CCP) and single edge-cracked plate (SECP) bi-material specimens of different material combinations under non-uniform stress distributions. The complex SIFs were determined for the loading cases of uniform, linear, parabolic or cubic stress distributions applied to the crack faces in both normal and shear directions. Then, general mathematical forms of the two complex crack face weight functions for interface cracks, one for normal loading, and one for shear loading, have been formulated by taking advantages of the knowledge of specific analytical complex weight functions available in the literature, and certain properties of the complex weight functions in general. The existence of the general functional forms simplifies the determination of these weight functions for specific crack geometrical configurations and bi-material combinations. The determination of a specific weight function is thus reduced to the determination of the unknown parameters of the generalized weight function functional forms. It was demonstrated these unknown parameters can be determined from reference stress intensity factors. This method was used to derive the complex weight functions for interface cracks in bi-material CCP and SECP specimens. The derived closed-form weight functions were then validated against complex stress intensity factors solutions for several non-linear normal and shear stress distributions.