Energy release rate and stress intensity factor in antiplane elasticity (Q543926)

The authors study the stability of cracks in brittle materials in the nonsmooth case. They extend the class of curves for which the energy release rate can be rigorously computed, hence, they provide a set of admissible cracks where the energy rate is continuous with respect to the convergence of the curves. The authors present a different method to calculate the derivative of the energy when the crack \(\Gamma\) is only of class \(C^{1,1}\), proving that the derivative exists at all points, even if the curve has not a second derivative.