Interface Cracks in Kirchhoff Anisotropic Thin Plates of Dissimilar Materials

This paper investigates the problem of stretching and bending deformations of a Kirchhoff anisotropic thin plate composed of two dissimilar materials bonded along a straight interface containing a crack. Our analysis makes use of the Stroh octet formalism developed recently by Cheng and Reddy (Cheng and Reddy, 2002, “Octet Formalism for Kirchhoff Anisotropic Plates,” Proc. R. Soc. Lond., A458, pp. 1499–1517; Cheng and Reddy, 2003, “Green’s Functions for Infinite and Semi-Infinite Anisotropic Thin Plates,” ASME J. Appl. Mech., 70, pp. 260–267; Cheng and Reddy, 2004, “Laminated Anisotropic Thin Plate With an Elliptic Inhomogeneity,” Mech. Mater., 36, pp. 647–657; Cheng and Reddy, 2005, “Structure and Properties of the Fundamental Elastic Plate Matrix,” J. Appl. Math. Mech., 85, pp. 721–739) for Kirchhoff anisotropic plates. It is found that the interfacial crack-tip field consists of a pair of two-dimensional oscillatory singularities, which are explicitly determined. Two complex intensity factors are proposed to evaluate the two oscillatory singularities.