ABSTRACT
Mechanical failure of structures often results from stress concentration at the material surfaces. The nominally flat surfaces bounding elastically stressed solids appear to be unstable with respect to the formation of surface undulations of wavelengths greater than some critical value. The nature of this instability reflects the nature of surface evolution dictated by the competition between surface and elastic energies. Although the amplitude of surface undulations is usually small in comparison with their wavelength, they may cause significant stress concentrations near the surface. This chapter deals with 3-D elastic stress analysis of anisotropic plates with undulating surfaces under bending loads. Due to the complexity of geometrical shape of the surfaces, the 3-D boundary-value problem cannot be solved directly. The boundary shape perturbation method is applied in order to simplify boundary conditions.
