Thermal resistance inside an interface crack in the functionally graded sandwich structures

This article proposes a thermal facture model of sandwich structures occupying a functionally graded interlayer with thermal resistance inside the crack region introduced. The crack surfaces are partially thermally insulated with thermally insulated crack and thermally conductive crack as limiting cases. A system of singular integral equations in thermo‐elastic field is reduced and solved numerically by using the collocation methods with higher asymptotic terms in order to improve the convergence and accuracy. For a special case, exact solution is derived to validate the theoretical analysis and numerical computation. Numerical analyses are conducted to reveal the influences of the graded interlayer size, graded parameter and dimensionless thermal resistance on the temperatures along the crack plane and the stress intensity factors.