ON STATIONARY AND MOVING INTERFACE CRACKS WITH FRICTIONLESS CONTACT IN ANISOTROPIC BIMATERIALS

The asymptotic structure of near-tip fields around stationary and steadily growing interface cracks, with frictionless crack surface contact, and in anisotropic bimaterials, is analysed with the method of analytic continuation, and a complete representation of the asymptotic fields is obtained in terms of arbitrary entire functions. It is shown that when the symmetry, if any, and orientation of the anisotropic bimaterial is such that the in-plane and out-of-plane deformations can be separated from each other, the in-plane crack-tip fields will have a non-oscillatory, inverse-squared-root type stress singularity, with angular variations clearly resembling those for a classical mode II problem when the bimaterial is orthotropic. However, when the two types of deformations are not separable, it is found that an oscillatory singularity different than that of the counterpart open-crack problem may exist at the crack tip for the now coupled in-plane and out-of-plane deformation. In general, a substantial part of the non-singular higher-order terms of the crack-tip fields will have forms that are identical to those for the counterpart open-crack problem, which give rise to fully continuous displacement components and zero tractions along the crack surfaces as well as the material interface.