Mapping Flat Cracks onto Penny-shaped Cracks, with Application to Somewhat Circular Tensile Cracks

Consider a three-dimensional homogeneous isotropic elastic solid containing a flat pressurized crack, fi. The problem of finding the resulting stress distribution can be reduced to a hypersingular integral equation over Q for the crack-opening displacement. Here, this equation is transformed into a similar equation over a circular region D, using a conformal mapping between Q and D. This new equation is then regularized analytically by using an appropriate expansion method (Fourier series in the azimuthal direction and series of orthogonal polynomials in the radial direction). Analytical results for regions that are approximately circular are also obtained. The method will generalize to other scalar problems and to vector problems (such as shear loading of the crack).