Frictional contact analysis of multiple cracks by incremental displacement and resultant traction boundary integral equations

Based on the merits of the dual boundary element technique, a modified dual boundary element technique is extended to deal with the frictional contact of a finite plate with arbitrarily distributed multiple cracks. Besides establishing the incremental displacement boundary integral equation on the outer boundary, the resultant traction boundary integral equation on one of the crack surfaces is also developed. Since the resultant traction instead of incremental traction on the crack surface is introduced, the computed resultant contact tractions under sliding condition satisfy the Coulomb's friction law directly. Hence, as compared with the authors' previous work, only very few computation iterations are required by this method to accurately describe the contact situations of crack surfaces. As a result, not only the linear cracks, but also other types of multiple cracks, for example, curved and kinked cracks, can be tackled. The effects of friction and interaction among cracks on the computation of stress intensity factors are also displayed. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.