Boundary element analysis of the stress singularity at the interface corner of viscoelastic adhesive layers

This paper concerns the stress singularity at the interface corner between the adhesive layer and the rigid adherend subjected to a uniform transverse tensile strain. The adhesive is assumed to be a linear viscoelastic material. The standard Laplace transform technique is employed to gel the characteristic equation and the order of the singularity is obtained numerically for given viscoelastic models. The time-domain boundary element method is used to investigate the behavior of stresses for the whole interface. For the viscoelastic models considered, it is shown that the free-edge stress intensity factors are relaxed with time, while the order of the singularity increases with time or remains constant. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd.