A Critical Review on the Complex Potentials in Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics

Introducing a crack in an elastic plate is challenging from the mathematical point of view and relevant within an engineering context of evaluating strength and reliability of structures. Accordingly, a multitude of associated works is available to date, emanating from both applied mathematics and mechanics communities. Although considering the same problem, the given complex potentials prove to be different, revealing various inconsistencies in terms of resulting stresses and displacements. Essential information on crack near-tip fields and crack opening displacements is nonetheless available, while intuitive adaption is required to obtain the full-field solutions. Investigating the cause of prevailing deficiencies inevitably leads to a critical review of classical works by Muskhelishvili or Westergaard. Complex potentials of the mixed-mode loaded Griffith crack, sparing restrictive assumptions or limitations of validity, are finally provided, allowing for rigorous mathematical treatment. The entity of stresses and displacements in the whole plate is finally illustrated and the distributions in the crack plane are given explicitly.

Asymptotic Self-Similarity of Minimizers and Local Bounds in a Model of Shape-Memory Alloys

We prove that microstructures in shape-memory alloys have a self-similar refinement pattern close to austenite-martensite interfaces, working within the scalar Kohn-Müller model. The latter is based on nonlinear elasticity and includes a singular perturbation representing the energy of the interfaces between martensitic variants. Our results include the case of low-hysteresis materials in which one variant has a small volume fraction. Precisely, we prove asymptotic self-similarity in the sense of strong convergence of blow-ups around points at the austenite-martensite interface. Key ingredients in the proof are pointwise estimates and local energy bounds. This generalizes previous results by one of us to various boundary conditions, arbitrary rectangular domains, and arbitrary volume fractions of the martensitic variants, including the regime in which the energy scales as $\varepsilon ^{2/3}$ ε 2 / 3 as well as the one where the energy scales as $\varepsilon ^{1/2}$ ε 1 / 2 .

Computable Constants for Korn’s Inequalities on Riemannian Manifolds

A method is presented for the explicit construction of the non-dimensional constant occurring in Korn’s inequalities for a bounded two-dimensional Riemannian differentiable simply connected manifold subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions. The method is illustrated by application to the spherical cap and minimal surface.