Applications of conservation integral to indentation with a rigid punch

When a substrate of the brittle material is indented by a relatively rigid, square-ended punch, a singular stress field and K-dominant region will arise at the near-surface adjacent to the punch corners. The singularity of this stress field is identical with the mode I crack. The stress intensity factor in this case represents the intensification of the stress fields induced by indentation. In present article, a new method to determine the stress intensity factors of the indentation problems is developed based on the conservation law. The physical meanings of the proposed method and some numerical analysis have been investigated.