Formulation for Cracks in Plate Bending

The derivation of the boundary integral equations for plate bending (Lecture 22) is based on the presumption that the moment and shear resultants remain bounded near the boundary origin point. However, in a number of significant problems the stress resultants do indeed become unbounded, for example at the base of a through crack or more generally at a reentrant corner. In these cases the singular behavior of the stress resultants are frequently themselves a focus of interest.