We consider a quasistatic system involving a Volterra kernel modelling an hereditarily-elastic aging body. We are concerned with the behavior of displacement and stress fields in the neighborhood of cracks. In this paper, we investigate the case of a straight crack in a two-dimensional domain with a possibly anisotropic material law. We study the asymptotics of the time dependent solution near the crack tips. We prove that, depending on the regularity of the material law and the Volterra kernel, these asymptotics contain singular functions which are simple homogeneous functions of degree $\frac12$ or have a more complicated dependence on the distance variable r to the crack tips. In the latter situation, we observe a novel behavior of the singular functions, incompatible with the usual fracture criteria, involving super polynomial functions of ln r growing in time.

We consider the time-harmonic eddy current problem in its electric formulation where the conductor is a polyhedral domain. By proving the convergence in energy, we justify in what sense this problem is the limit of a family of Maxwell transmission problems: Rather than a low frequency limit, this limit has to be understood in the sense of Bossavit [11]. We describe the singularities of the solutions. They are related to edge and corner singularities of certain problems for the scalar Laplace operator, namely the interior Neumann problem, the exterior Dirichlet problem, and possibly, an interface problem. These singularities are the limit of the singularities of the related family of Maxwell problems.

We investigate time harmonic Maxwell equations in heterogeneous media, where the permeability μ and the permittivity ε are piecewise constant. The associated boundary value problem can be interpreted as a transmission problem. In a very natural way the interfaces can have edges and corners. We give a detailed description of the edge and corner singularities of the electromagnetic fields.

This is the first of two papers in which we study the singularities of solutions of second-order linear elliptic boundary value problems at the edges of piecewise analytic domains in ℝ3. When the opening angle at the edge is variable, there appears the phenomenon of “crossing” of the exponents of singularities. For this case, we introduce the appropriate combinations of the simple tensor product singularities that allow us to give estimates in ordinary and weighted Sobolev spaces for the regular part of the solution and for the coefficients of the singularities. These combinations appear in a natural way as sections of an analytic bundle above the edge. Their behaviour is described with the help of divided differences of powers of the distance to the edge. The class of operators considered includes second-order elliptic operators with analytic complex-valued coefficients with mixed Dirichlet, Neumann or oblique derivative conditions. With our description of the singularities we are able to remove some restrictive hypotheses that were previously made in other works. In this first part, we prove the basic facts in a simplified framework. Nevertheless the tools we use are essentially the same in the general situation.

This is the second of two papers in which we study the singularities of solutions of second-order linear elliptic boundary value problems at the edges of piecewise analytic domains in ℝ3. When the opening angle at the edge is variable, there appears trie phenomenon of “crossing” of the exponents of singularities. In Part I, we introduced for the Dirichlet problem appropriate combinations of the simple tensor product singularities.

In this second part, we extend the results of Part I to general non-homogeneous boundary conditions. Moreover, we show how these combinations of singularities appear in a natural way as sections of an analytic vector bundle above the edge. In the case when the interior operator is the Laplacian, we give a simpler expression of the combined singular functions, involving divided differences of powers of a complex variable describing the coordinates in the normal plane to the edge.

We study a boundary integral equation method for transmission problems for strongly elliptic differential operators, which yields a strongly elliptic system of pseudodifferential operators and which therefore can be used for numerical computations with Galerkin's procedure. The method is shown to work for the vector Helmholtz equation in ℝ3 with electromagnetic transmission conditions. We propose a slightly modified system of boundary values in order for the corresponding bilinear form to be coercive over H1. We analyse the boundary integral equations using the calculus of pseudodifferential operators. Here the concept of the principal symbol is used to derive existence and regularity results for the solution.

It is shown that the elements of the closed operator algebra generated by one-dimensional singular integral operators with piecewise continuous coefficients with a fixed finite set of points of discontinuity can be written as the sum of a singular integral operator, a compact operator, and generalized Mellin convolutions. Their Gohberg-Krupnik symbol is given in terms of the Mellin transform. This gives an explicit construction of an operator with prescribed Gohberg—Krupnik symbol.