Stress intensity factors at tips of branched cracks under various loadings

Several papers have been published on branched cracks by using various analytical methods, but most of them are concerned with special crack geometries or special loading conditions, and often give unreliable values for cracks with short branches or with small branching angles. The purpose of this paper is to give reliable formulae and new results of the stress intensity factors of various branched cracks in a wide plate. The analysis is based on the body force method combined with a perturbation procedure, and the stress intensity factors at the tips of all the branches and the main crack are given by power series formulae. Numerical results for typical branched cracks are discussed.