Abstract
In this study, a fundamental approach to make clear the mechanism of the mutual interference and coalescence of stress fields in the vicinity of two crack tips on the process of their slow growth, using boundary element method. Automatic generation of quadratic discontinuous elements along both of the crack boundaries which can be defined by an arbitrary piece-wise straight geometry. The direction of the crack-extension increment is predicted by the maximum principal stress criterion, corrected to account for the discreteness of the crack extension. Along the computed direction, the crack is extended one increment. Automatic incremental crack-extension analysis with no remeshing, computation of the stress intensity factors by J-integral. Numerical stress intensity factors for two growing cracks in plane-homogeneous regions were determined.