Copyright © 2010 Chao-Shi Chen et al. 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 presents a single-domain boundary element method (SDBEM) for linear elastic fracture mechanics analysis in the 2D anisotropic bimaterial. In this formulation, the displacement integral equation is collocated on the uncracked boundary only, and the traction integral equation is collocated on one side of the crack surface only. The complete fundamental solution (Green's function) for anisotropic bi-materials was also derived and implemented into the boundary integral formulation so the discretization along the interface can be avoided except for the interfacial crack part. A special crack-tip element was introduced to capture exactly the crack-tip behavior. A computer program with the FORTRAN code has been developed to effectively calculate the stress intensity factors, crack initiation angle, and propagation path of an anisotropic bi-material. This SDBEM program has been verified having a good accuracy with the previous researches. In addition, a rock of type (1)/(2) disk specimen with a central crack was made to conduct the Brazilian test under diametrical loading. The result shows that the numerical analysis can predict relatively well the direction of crack initiation and the path of crack propagation.