A NEW METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF ARBITRARILY-SHAPED CRACKS BY THE BODY FORCE METHOD

The body force method provides a versatile approach for crack propagat ion problems. This method is particularly advantageous for determinati on of stress intensity factors. However, the crack displacement of ben t or branched cracks cannot be obtained by the conventional resultant force method and a division of the crack into a large number of elemen ts is required to obtain accurate results. In this paper, we propose a new resultant force method to obtain crack opening displacement of be nt or branched cracks, which dramatically improves the accuracy of the solution. The effectiveness of this new method is illustrated by solv ing some typical crack problems.