Characterization of stress concentration in two-dimensional boundary value problems: Neumann-type and Dirichlet-type

Abstract

We consider a boundary value problem for the conductivity equation in a bounded domain containing an inclusion which is nearly touching to the domain's boundary. We assume that the domain and the inclusion are disks with conductivity jump on the boundary of the inclusion. By using the layer potential technique and adopting the bipolar coordinates, we derive the asymptotic formulas which explicitly describe the gradient blow-up of the solution as the distance between the inclusion and the domain's boundary tends to zero. It turns out that the gradient blow-up term can be identified with the electric field generated by certain kind of virtual line charges supported on line segments outside of the domain; thereby, the gradient blow-up is completely characterized in terms of both of Neumann-type and Dirichlet-type boundary conditions, conductivities and geometric parameters.