Determination of the stress intensity factors of cracks was a fundamental issue for assessing the performance safety and predicting the service lifetime of engineering structures. In the present paper, a dislocation-based semi-analytical method was presented by integrating the continuous dislocation model with the finite element method together. Using the superposition principle, a two-dimensional crack problem in a finite elastic body was reduced to the solution of a set of coupled singular integral equations and the calculation of the stress fields of a body which had the same shape as the original one but had no crack. It could easily solve crack problems of structures with arbitrary shape, and the calculated stress intensity factors showed almost no dependence upon the finite element mesh. Some representative examples were given to illustrate the efficacy and accuracy of this novel numerical method. Only two-dimensional cases were addressed here, but this method could be extended to three-dimensional problems.

Dislocation-Based Semi-Analytical Method for Calculating Stress Intensity Factors of Cracks: Two-Dimensional Cases. X.Q.Feng, Y.F.Shi, X.Y.Wang, B.Li, S.W.Yu, Q.Yang: Engineering Fracture Mechanics, 2010, 77[18], 3521-31