Interface Cracks in Kirchhoff Anisotropic Thin Plates of Dissimilar Materials

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of stretching and bending deformations of a Kirchhoff anisotropic thin plate composed of two dissimilar materials bonded along a straight interface containing a crack. Our analysis makes use of the Stroh octet formalism developed recently by Cheng and Reddy (Cheng and Reddy, 2002, “Octet Formalism for Kirchhoff Anisotropic Plates,â€‌ Proc. R. Soc. Lond., A458, pp. 1499–1517; Cheng and Reddy, 2003, “Green’s Functions for Infinite and SemiInfinite Anisotropic Thin Plates,â€‌ ASME J. Appl. Mech., 70, pp. 260–267; Cheng and Reddy, 2004, “Laminated Anisotropic Thin Plate With an Elliptic Inhomogeneity,â€‌ Mech. Mater., 36, pp. 647–657; Cheng and Reddy, 2005, “Structure and Properties of the Fundamental Elastic Plate Matrix,â€‌ J. Appl. Math. Mech., 85, pp. 721–739) for Kirchhoff anisotropic plates. It is found that the interfacial cracktip field consists of a pair of twodimensional oscillatory singularities, which are explicitly determined. Two complex intensity factors are proposed to evaluate the two oscillatory singularities.