A new boundary integral equation formulation for plane orthotropic elastic media

A new boundary integral equation formulation for solving plane elasticity problems involving orthotropic media is presented in this paper. Based on the real variable fundamental solutions of the considered problems, a limit theorem for the transformation from domain integral equations into boundary integral equations (BIEs) and a novel decomposition technique to the fundamental solutions, the regularized BIEs with indirect unknowns, which do not involve the direct calculation of CPV and HFP integrals, are established. The limiting process is done in global coordinates and no separate numerical treatment for strong and weak singular integrals was necessary. The current method does not need to transform the considered problems into isotropic ones as is normally done in the existing literature, so no inverse transform is required. The numerical implementation is carried out using both discontinuous quadratic elements and exact elements, which is developed to model its boundary with negligible error. The validity of the proposed scheme is demonstrated by three numerical examples. Excellent agreement between the numerical results and exact solutions was obtained even with using small amounts of element.