SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy © Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 phys.scichina.com www.springerlink.com *Corresponding author (email: wjfeng9999@yahoo.com)  Research Paper  September 2011 Vol.54 No.9: 1666–1679 doi: 10.1007/s11433-011-4403-0 A magnetically impermeable and electrically permeable interface crack with a contact zone in a magnetoelectroelastic bimaterial under concentrated magnetoelectromechanical loads on the crack faces FENG WenJie 1* , MA Peng 1 , PAN ErNian 2 & LIU JinXi 1 1 Department of Engineering Mechanics, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang 050043, China; 2 Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH 44329, USA Received February 10, 2011; accepted May 3, 2011; published online July 18, 2011 An interface crack with a frictionless contact zone at the right crack-tip between two dissimilar magnetoelectroelastic materials under the action of concentrated magnetoelectromechanical loads on the crack faces is considered. The open part of the crack is assumed to be magnetically impermeable and electrically permeable. The Dirichlet–Riemann boundary value problem is formulated and solved analytically. Stress, magnetic induction and electrical displacement intensity factors as well as energy release rate are thus found in analytical forms. Analytical expressions for the contact zone length have been derived. Some numerical results are presented and compared with those based on the other crack surface conditions. It is shown clearly that the location and magnitude of the applied loads could significantly affect the contact zone length, the stress intensity factor and the energy release rate. interface crack, magnetoelectroelastic bimaterial, concentrated loads, contact zone length, fracture behaviors PACS: 44.05.+e, 46.25.Hf, 46.50.+a, 77.65.-j 1 Introduction Magnetoelectroelastic materials have been widely used in electronics industry. The technical applications include waveguides, sensors, phase invertors, transducers, etc. [1]. In the design of magnetoelectroelastic structures, it is im- portant to take into account the defects/imperfections, such as cracks, which are often pre-existing or are generated by external loads during the service life. Therefore, in recent years, research on fracture mechanics of magnetoelectroe- lastic materials has drawn much attention [2–19]. For two-dimensional (2-D) plane crack problems, Liu et al. [20] derived the general Green’s function for an infinite magnetoelectroelastic plane containing an elliptic cavity where they reduced it to solve a permeable crack in the sys- tem. Gao et al. [21,22] analyzed single and collinear cracks in an infinite magnetoelectroelastic material and obtained the extended stress intensity factors. Song and Sih [23] and Sih et al. [24] investigated the influence of both magnetic and electric fields on the crack growth, in particular, on the crack initiation angle under various crack surface conditions for Mode-I, Mode-II, and mixed mode crack models. Tian and Gabbert [25,26] studied the interaction of multiple arbi- trarily oriented and distributed cracks and of macrocrack- microcrack in homogeneous magnetoelectroelastic materials. Wang and Mai [27] discussed the effects of four kinds of ideal magnetoelectrical crack-face conditions on fracture properties of magnetoelectroelastic materials. Zhong and Li [28] obtained the T-stress for a Griffith crack in an infinite