The present paper shows the applicability of the dual boundary element method to analyse plastic, viscoplastic and creep behaviours in fracture mechanics problems. Several models with a crack, including a square plate, a holed plate and a notched plate, are analysed. Special attention is taken when the discretization of the domain is performed. In fact, for the plasticity and viscoplasticity cases, only the region susceptible to yielding was discretized, whereas the creep case required the discretization of the whole domain. The proposed formulation is presented as an alternative technique to study these kinds of nonlinear problems. Results from the present formulation are compared to those of the well‐established finite element technique, and they are in good agreement. Important fracture mechanic parameters like KI, KII, J‐integrals and C‐integrals are also included. In general, the results, for the plastic, viscoplastic and creep cases, exhibit that the highest stress concentrations are in the vicinity of the crack tip and they decrease as the distance from the crack tip is increased.

In the present communication, scattering of elastic waves in fluid-layered solid interfaces is studied. The indirect boundary element method is used to deal with this wave propagation phenomenon in 2D fluid-layered solid models. The source is represented by Hankel’s function of second kind and this is always applied in the fluid. Our method is an approximate boundary integral technique which is based upon an integral representation for scattered elastic waves using single-layer boundary sources. This approach is typically called indirect because the sources’ strengths are calculated as an intermediate step. In addition, this formulation is regarded as a realization of Huygens’ principle. The results are presented in frequency and time domains. Various aspects related to the different wave types that emerge from this kind of problems are emphasized. A near interface pulse generates changes in the pressure field and can be registered by receivers located in the fluid. In order to show the accuracy of our method, we validated the results with those obtained by the discrete wave number applied to a fluid-solid interface joining two half-spaces, one fluid and the other an elastic solid.