Mode-I stress intensity factor derivation by a suitable Green's function

A suitable Green's function is developed for the infinite elastic solid, containing internal penny-shaped crack and loaded by a singular co-axial tensile and radial ring-shaped source acting outside or on crack faces. The corresponding boundary integral equation (BIE) is solved by the BEM for the calculation of the mode-I stress intensity factor of cracked axisymmetric finite bodies under tension. The proposed technique has three advantages: (a) it does not require discretization of the crack surface, (b) it does not require multiregion modeling and (c) it reduces the 3-D discretization of the solid to 1-D, resulting in substantially reduced effort. Numerical results are derived for the case of a cylindrical bar with a central penny-shaped crack located in a plane normal to its axis, loaded by tensile force. Comparison with results of other methods are included indicating excellent agreement.