Fracture mechanics analysis in 2-D anisotropic thermoelasticity using BEM

In the direct formulation of the boundary element method (BEM), a volume in tegral arises in the resulting integral equation if thermal effects are pre sent. The steps to transform this volume integral into boundary ones in an exact analytical manner are reviewed in this paper for two- dimensional ani sotropic thermoelasticity. The general applicability of the BEM algorithm f or fracture mechanics applications is demonstrated by three crack problems with slanted cracks. The numerical results of the stress intensity factors are presented and compared with those obtained using superposition.