Development of a distributed dislocation dipole technique for the analysis of multiple straight, kinked and branched cracks in an elastic half-plane

A distributed dislocation dipole technique for the analysis of multiple straight, kinked and branched cracks in an elastic half plane has been developed. The dipole density distribution is represented with a weighted Jacobi polynomial expansion where the weight function captures the asymptotic behaviour at each end of the crack. To allow for opening and sliding at crack kinking and branching the dipole density representation contains conditional extra terms which fulfills the asymptotic behaviour at each endpoint. Several test cases involving straight, kinked and branched cracks have been analysed, and the results suggest that the accuracy of the method is within 1% provided that Jacobi polynomial expansions up to at least the sixth order are used. Adopting even higher order Jacobi polynomials yields improved accuracy. The method is compared to a simplified procedure suggested in the literature where stress singularities associated with corners at kinking or branching are neglected in the representation for the dipole density distribution. The comparison suggests that both procedures work, but that the current procedure is superior, in as much as the same accuracy is reached using substantially lower order polynomial expansions.