Boundary Perturbations Due to the Presence of Small Linear Cracks in an Elastic Body

In this paper, Neumann cracks in elastic bodies are considered. We establish a rigorous asymptotic expansion for the boundary perturbations of the displacement (and traction) vectors that are due to the presence of a small elastic linear crack. The formula reveals that the leading order term is ε2 where ε is the length of the crack, and the ε3-term vanishes. We obtain an asymptotic expansion of the elastic potential energy as an immediate consequence of the boundary perturbation formula. The derivation is based on layer potential techniques. It is expected that the formula would lead to very effective direct approaches for locating a collection of small elastic cracks and estimating their sizes and orientations.