On the boundary integral equations for the crack opening displacement of flat cracks

The boundary integral equations for the crack opening displacement in acoustic and elastic scattering problems are discussed in the case of flat cracks by means of the Fourier analysis technique. The pseudo-differential nature of the hypersingular integral operators is shown and their symbols explicited. It is then proved that the variational problems assocaited with these BIE are well-posed in a Sobolev functional framework which is closely linked with the elastic energy. A decomposition of the vector integral equation in the elastic case into scalar integral equations is obtained as a by-product of the variational formulation.