An analytic element model for highly fractured elastic media

We present an analytic formulation for an elastic medium under uniform stress and in plane strain, with a very large number of cracks that are allowed to intersect. The singularities at the tips of the cracks are represented exactly; the solution is written in terms of series expansions of negative powers of a complex variable defined outside the unit circle in a complex reference plane. We modeled an assembly of 10,000 cracks and show stress trajectories both for the whole model and for individual cracks, chosen at random from the assembly.