Analysis of Branched Interface Cracks Between Dissimilar Anisotropic Media

A solution is presented for the problem of a crack branching off the interface between two dissimilar anisotropic materials. A Green’s function solution is developed using the complex potentials of Lekhnitskii (1981) allowing the branched crack problem to be expressed in terms of coupled singular integral equations. Numerical results for the stress intensity factors at the branch crack tip are presented for some special cases, including the no-interface case which is compared to the isotropic no-interface results of Lo (1978).