Brittle cleavage of a piecewise-homogeneous elastic medium (Q1082854)

Stationary pre-Rayleigh motion of a rigid body along a straight line connecting two elastic half-planes with the formation of a crack and a cavern is investigated. The contact between the edges in a small zone of the edge of the crack and outside the cavern at a large distance from the wedge is taken into account by the method of joining asymptotic expansions. As is shown, the ratios between the characteristic lengths are, respectively, quite small and quite large parameters if the wedge velocity is not close to the Rayleigh velocity, which specifies the advisability of using such an approach.