A numerical coupling method for the treatment of kinked cracks in finite bodies

The boundary element method has received considerable attention in recent years as an alternative to the finite element method for analysis of a wide range of engineering problems. The effort has been particularly intense in the stress analysis area of cracks. For the treatment of kinked cracks in finite bodies, a displacement discontinuity method was developed for modeling cracks in linear-elastic two dimensional infinite domains. It was shown that the new technique is well-suited to the treatment of kinked cracks. In this paper, this method is then coupled to the standard boundary-element method for the treatment of cracks in finite two dimensional regions. The hybrid approach has been implemented on a computer and representative results are presented. The resulting method is shown to be simple, yet very acurrate. (Author)