Interfacial cracks in bi-material solids: Stroh formalism and skew-symmetric weight functions

A new general approach for deriving the weight functions for 2D interfacial cracks in anisotropic bimaterials has been developed.For perfect interface conditions, the new method avoid the use of Wiener-Hopf technique and the challenging factorization problem connected. Both symmetric and skew-symmetric weight functions can be derived by means of the new approach. Weight functions can be used for deriving singular integral formulation of interfacial cracks in anisotropic media. The proposed method can be applied for studying interfacial cracks problems in many materials:monoclinic, orthotropic, cubic, piezoelectrics, poroelastics, quasicrystals.