Analysis of Stress Intensity Factors for Curved Cracks

In this paper, the hypersingular integral equation method (HIEM) is applied to calculate the stress intensity factors of curved crack problems. The stress fields induced by two kinds of displacement discontinuity are used as fundamental solutions. Then, the problem is formulated as a system of integral equations with the singularity of the form of r^-2. In the numerical calculation, two kinds of unknown functions are approximated by the products of the fundamental density functions and polynomials. The calculation shows 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 shaped curved cracks is proposed using the approximate replacement to a simple straight crack