Abstract
In composite materials, which are constructed of two dissimilar orthotropic half-planes bonded by a nonhomogeneous orthotropic layer, an interface crack is situated at the lower interface between the layer and the lower half-plane. The stress intensity factors are solved under uniform tension normal to the crack The material properties of the bonding layer vary continuously from the lower half-plane to the upper half-plane. The boundary conditions are reduced to dual integral equations using the Fourier transform technique. In order to satisfy the boundary conditions outside the crack, the differences in displacements at the crack surfaces are expanded in a series of functions that vanish outside the crack. The unknown coefficients in each series are evaluated using the Schmidt method. The stress intensity factors are calculated numerically for perpendicularly bonded unidirectional glass fiber reinforced epoxy laminae.
