Author(s)

H. Igawa and M. Isida

Abstract

In the fatigue of materials, it is often observed that a number of cracks initiate from pre-existing defects and propagate to form major cracks causing the final failure. In this paper, we consider a doubly-periodic array of slant cracks in an infinite solid subjected to tension as two-dimensional models of randomly distributed cracks in materials. In the analysis, we choose a suitable unit region and express the complex stress potentials in eigenfunction expansions satisfying the traction-free conditions of the crack edges. The unknown coefficients are determined from the boundary conditions of the unit region. At this stage, we use a new procedure based on element-wise resultant forces and displacements in order to get highly

Keywords