SINGULAR INTEGRAL EQUATION FOR SOLVING COHESIVE CRACK PROBLEM FOR INITIALLY RIGID TRACTION-SEPARATION RELATION

In case of an initially rigid traction-separation cohesive relation, the total potential energy is not differentiable. This makes the use of variational operator over it questionable. Therefore, the accurate application of FEM is mathematically doubtful. The present work bypasses this issue by modelling the cohesive crack problem as a singular integral equation and solving it using Chebyshev polynomials.
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