The method of fundamental solutions for fracture mechanics—Reissner's plate application

The application of the method of fundamental solutions (MFS), a mesh-free technique, to solve cracked Reissner's plates is discussed in this work. Here, the numerical Green's function (NGF) previously developed by the authors is used as the fundamental solution required by the method. Stress intensity factors or the related force intensity factors are obtained using the generalized crack openings at a single point near the tip, computed through a summation of the fundamental generalized openings at that point weighted by their influence factors. Despite the ill-conditioning of the equations system, which may require appropriate handling to solve (such as the singular value decomposition method), examples show good results for problems with embedded cracks. The method can be a good option to evaluate stress intensity factors of given problems due to its simple and intuitive implementation.