Transient concentrated thermal/mechanical loading of the faces of a crack in a coupled-thermoelastic solid (Q1282681)

We present a near-tip, transient, coupled thermoelastodynamic solution for the plane stress/ strain problem of a crack subjected to a concentrated thermal and/or mechanical loading, which is suddenly and symmetrically applied to the crack faces. Interest is focused on the stress field in the immediate vicinity of the crack during a small time-interval right after the application of loading and, therefore, the cracked body is considered of infinite extent and the crack itself of semi-infinite length. The thermoelastic wave propagation problem, which contains a characteristic length associated with the forcing function, is solved exactly in the time Laplace-transform domain by an analytic-function method. The inversion of the time Laplace-transformed stress intensity factor is carried out through a numerical technique. The present solution provides the Green's function for thermoelastic cracked bodies under more general spatially non-uniform loadings.