Macrocrack-Microdefect Interaction

Elastic interactions (in terms of the stress intensity factor variation) of the macrocrack (represented as semi-infinite crack) with microdefects such as finite size, arbitrarily positioned crack, circular hole or inclusion are considered. A solution for the problem of the interaction with dilational inclusion is also given. The influence of the crack tip geometry on the surrounding stress field is studied by analyzing the case of crack-hole coalescence. Problems are considered in terms of complex stress potentials for linear elasticity and formulated as a singular integral equation on the semi-infinite interval. A stable numerical technique is developed for the solution of such equations. In a particular case, in order to evaluate the accuracy of the numerical procedure, results obtained through the numerical procedure are compared with the available analytical solution and found to be in excellent agreement.