ANALYSIS OF STRESS INTENSITY FACTORS FOR CURVED CRACKS

In this paper, numerical solution of hypersingular integral equations in curved-crack problems is presented. The stress fields induced by tw o kinds of standard sets of force doublets are used as fundamental sol utions. Then, the problem is formulated as a system of integral equati ons with the singularity of the form r-2. In the numerical calculation , two kinds of unknown functions are approximated by the products of t he fundamental density functions and power series. The calculation sho ws that the present method gives rapidly converging numerical results for curved cracks under various geometrical conditions. In addition, a method of evaluation of the stress intensity factors for arbitrary-sh aped curved cracks is proposed using the approximate replacement with a simple straight crack.