EXTENSION OF A LAYER WEAKENED BY TUNNELING CUTS

The classical three-dimensional problem of the theory of elasticity fo r a layer weakened by generally curvilinear through-cuts is considered . A characteristic feature of the present study is that one-dimensiona l singular integral equations or, more precisely, an infinite system o f such equations is used to solve the three-dimensional boundary-value problem. Numerical experiments indicate that the solution of this sys tem by the reduction method converges quite rapidly almost everywhere in the range of variation of the thickness coordinate and the third ap proximation hardly increases the accuracy of results in this range. He nce the proposed procedure reduces the dimension of the problem by two . The accuracy of the solution needs to be improved in the immediate v icinity of the support of the layer, which involves singularities at t he edge. This problem is not considered in this paper.