Mode-III crack kinking under stress-wave loading

A horizontally polarized step-stress wave is incident on a semi-infinite crack in an elastic solid. At the instant that the crack tip is struck, the crack starts to propagate in the forward direction, but under an angle κπ with the plane of the original crack. In this paper a self-similar solution is obtained for the particle velocity of the diffracted cylindrical wave field. The use of Chaplygin's transformation reduces the problem to the solution of Laplace's equation in a semi-infinite strip containing a slit. The Schwarz-Christoffel transformation is employed to map the semi-infinite strip on a half-plane. An analytic function in the half-plane which satisfies appropriate conditions along the real axis, can subsequently be constructed. The Mode-III stress-intensity factor at the tip of the kinked crack has been computed for angles of incidence varying from normal to grazing incidence, for angles of crack kinking defined by -0.5≤κ≤0.5, and for arbitrary subsonic crack tip speeds.