HYPERSINGULAR FORMULATION FOR BOUNDARY STRESS EVALUATION

Instead of using shape function derivatives and Hooke's law, the full stress tensor is evaluated at boundary points by direct application of boundary integral identities for the displacement derivatives. It is first shown that integral equations with singular or hypersingular kernels do not give rise to unbounded terms, even when the source point is on the boundary. A general method for performing the integration is also described. Numerical results are quite interesting, since the stress components evaluated through the hypersingular integral equation method show very good accuracy even on coarse meshes.