Progressive thermal stress distribution around a crack under Joule heating in orthotropic materials

Stress intensity factor and stress distribution at crack tips are classical problems in solids, which are closely related to the failure and reliability of materials. A crack in a nonlinearly coupled anisotropic medium, on the other hand, is much more difficult to analyze. Using the generalized complex variable method, the thermal stress problem of a crack embedded in an orthotropic medium has been analyzed, and the progressive thermal stress distributions have been obtained in closed-forms. The analysis shows that the thermal stress intensity factors are linear functions of remote thermal flux while are nonlinear functions of remote current; the thermal stress distributions under produced by thermal flux and Joule heating are similar, but not identical; the thermal stress intensity factors are linear functions with respect to the thermal expansion coefficients; with the increase of crack length, the thermal stress intensity factor caused by Joule heat increases rapidly; the thermal stress intensity factors are directly proportional to the temperature difference between the upper and lower crack surfaces and the left and right half crack surfaces divided by the square root of the crack length, and the ratios are only determined by the material parameters. These results provide a powerful tool for the failure and reliability analysis of conductive materials, and suggested that thermal stress analysis may be localized.