FRACTURE-MECHANICS ANALYSIS OF CRACKED 2-D ANISOTROPIC MEDIA WITH A NEW FORMULATION OF THE BOUNDARY-ELEMENT METHOD

A new formulation of the boundary element method (BEM) is proposed in this paper to calculate stress intensity factors for cracked 2-D aniso tropic materials. The most outstanding feature of this new approach is that the displacement and traction integral equations are collocated on the outside boundary of the problem (no-crack 0boundary) only and o n one side of the crack surfaces only, respectively. Since the new BEM formulation uses displacements or tractions as unknowns on the outsid e boundary and displacement differences as unknowns on the crack surfa ces, the formulation combines the best attributes of the traditional d isplacement BEM as well as the displacement discontinuity method (DDM) . Compared with the recently proposed dual BEM, the present approach d oesn't require dual elements and nodes on the crack surfaces, and furt her, it can be used for anisotropic media with cracks of any geometric shapes. Numerical examples of calculation of stress intensity factors were conducted, and excellent agreement with previously published res ults was obtained. The authors believe that the new BEM formulation pr esented in this paper will. provide an alternative and yet efficient n umerical technique for the study of cracked 2-D anisotropic media, and for the simulation of quasi-static crack propagation.