Surface instabilities in elastic anisotropic media with surface-parallel griffith cracks

Abstract In this paper buckling under plane-strain conditions due to a horizontal compression of an elastic, anisotropic half-space containing coplanar cracks at arbitrary locations is considered. A numerical procedure based on the Displacement Discontinuity Method is developed and is validated against the analytical solution of a half-space with a single crack. It is demonstrated that the critical buckling stress decreases dramatically as the distance between the free surface and the cracks diminishes.