This book presents recent advances related to the following two topics:
- how mechanical fields close to material or geometrical singularities such as cracks can be determined;
- how failure criteria can be established according to the singularity degrees related to these discontinuities.
Concerning the determination of mechanical fields close to a crack tip, the first part of the book presents most of the traditional methods in order to classify them into two major categories. The first is based on the stress field, such as the Airy function, and the second resolves the...