Fracture and contact problems for an elastic wedge

The paper deals with the plane elastostatic contact problem for an infinite elastic wedge of arbitrary angle. The medium is loaded through a frictionless rigid wedge of a given symmetric profile. Using the Mellin transform formulation the mixed boundary value problem is reduced to a singular integral equation with the contact stress as the unknown function. With the application of the results to the fracture of the medium in mind, the main emphasis in the study has been on the investigation of the singular nature of the stress state around the apex of the wedge and on the determination of the contact pressure.