Hybrid boundary element analysis for surface cracks Original Research Article

At first, a hybrid boundary element method used for linear elastic fracture analysis of surface crack is established by introducing the relative displacement fundamental function into the first and the second kind of boundary integral equations. Then the numerical approaches (including the classification of the boundaries, the division of the elements, the computation of the hyper-singular integral, etc.) are presented in detail. Finally, numerical examples for axial semi-elliptical surface crack and circumferential quasi-semi-elliptical surface crack in a cylinder are demonstrated to check the proposed method. The numerical results show that the proposed method has a high accuracy for analysis of the stress intensity factor of surface crack.