Spectral analysis of the Neumann-Poincaré operator and characterization of the stress concentration in anti-plane elasticity

When holes or hard elastic inclusions are closely located, stress which is the gradient of the solution to the anti-plane elasticity equation can be arbitrarily large as the distance between two inclusions tends to zero. It is important to precisely characterize the blow-up of the gradient of such an equation. In this paper we show that the blow-up of the gradient can be characterized by a singular function defined by the single layer potential of an eigenfunction corresponding to the eigenvalue 1/2 of a Neumann–Poincare type operator defined on the boundaries of the inclusions. By comparing the singular function with the one corresponding to two disks osculating to the inclusions, we quant…