Shielding effect and emission criterion of a screw dislocation near an interfacial blunt crack

Shielding effect and emission criterion of a screw dislocation near an interfacial blunt crack are dealt with in this paper. Utilizing the conformal mapping technique, the closed-form solutions are derived for complex potentials and stress fields due to a screw dislocation located near the interfacial blunt crack. The stress intensity factor on the crack tips and the critical stress intensity factor for dislocation emission are also calculated. The influence of the orientation of the dislocation and the morphology of the blunt crack as well as the material elastic dissimilarity on the shielding effect and the emission criterion is discussed in detail. The results show that positive screw dislocations can reduce the stress intensity factor of the interfacial blunt crack tip (shielding effect). The shielding effect increases with the increase of the shear modulus of the lower half-plane, but it decreases with the increase of the dislocation azimuth angle. The critical loads at infinity for dislocation emission increases with the increase of emission angle and curvature radius of blunt crack tip, and the most probable angle for screw dislocation emission is zero. The present solutions contain previous results as special cases. (condensed matter: structure, thermal and mechanical properties)