Green’s function for KI determination of axisymmetric elastic solids containing external circular crack

A new Green’s function is derived to determine the mode-I stress intensity factor for axisymmetric solids containing external circular crack. The formulated boundary integral equation is applied to a finite cylindrical bar with an external crack, and the obtained solution is compared with existing published results, indicating good agreement. The proposed method compared with the finite element method or the conventional application of the boundary element method provides the following main advantages: (a) it does not require discretization of the crack surface, (b) it does not require multi-region modeling and (c) it reduces the 3-D discretization of the solid to 1-D resulting in substantially reduced effort.