Comments on the evaluation of the stress intensity factor for a general re-entrant corner in anisotropic bi-materials

This paper illustrates an efficient contour integral procedure to obtain stress intensity factors in combination of the asymptotic analysis with finite element analysis. Note that this set-up is very general: the material can be anisotropic elastic, and the specimen can be built as a bi-material system, notches of arbitrary opening angle can be analyzed (γ = 0 → crack, γ = 180° → free edge).The purpose of this technical note is to comment on three issues in the notch mechanics: the interpretation of the eigenvalue equation, the definition of stress intensity factors, and the effect of the outer contour location on H-integral evaluations.