Copyright © 2009 Wei-Liang Wu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with an efficient dual boundary element method for 2d crack problems under antiplane shear loading. The dual equations are the displacement and the traction boundary integral equations. When the displacement equation is applied on the outer boundary and the traction equation on one of the crack surfaces, general crack problems with anti-plane shear loading can be solved with a single region formulation. The outer boundary is discretised with continuous quadratic elements; however, only one of the crack surfaces needs to be discretised with discontinuous quadratic elements. Highly accurate results are obtained, when the stress intensity factor is evaluated with the discontinuous quarter point element method. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the present formulation.