Symmetric Galerkin boundary integral fracture analysis for plane orthotropic elasticity

This paper discusses the formulation and implementation of the symmetric Galerkin boundary integral method for two dimensional linear elastic orthotropic fracture analysis. For the usual case of a traction-free crack, the symmetry of the coefficient matrix can be effectively exploited to significantly reduce the computational work required to construct the linear system. In addition, computation time is reduced by employing efficient analytic integration formulas for the analysis of the orthotropic singular and hypersingular integrals. Preliminary test calculations indicate that the method is both accurate and efficient.