Multiple interacting planar cracks in an anisotropic multilayered medium under an antiplane shear stress: A hypersingular integral approach

The problem of determining the stress field around an arbitrary number of arbitrarily-located planar cracks in an anisotropic elastic half-space which adheres perfectly to an infinitely-long elastic strip is considered. The strip is made up of several layers of anisotropic materials which are perfectly bonded to one another. The multilayered medium is assumed to undergo an antiplane deformation. Suitable integral expressions are used to represent the displacement and the stress, leading to a system of hypersingular integral equations to be solved. For a specific example of the problem, which involves particular transversely-isotropic materials, the hypersingular integral equations are solved numerically, in order to calculate the relevant crack tip stress intensity factors.