The effect of surface stress on an interface crack in linearly elastic materials

Abstract

We consider an interface crack whose crack faces are coated with a thin reinforcing film of separate elastic material. We obtain asymptotic solutions, which, in the case of plane elasticity, demonstrate that the addition of the thin film effectively eliminates the well-known oscillatory behavior of the displacement and stress fields in the vicinity of the crack tip leading to a strong square-root stress singularity. In the case of anti-plane elasticity, the effect of the reinforcement is to reduce the order of the stress singularity at the crack tip. In addition, we demonstrate that the reinforcement induces a displacement field which is smooth locally and bounded at the crack tip.