Abstract
The problem of the debonding of an elastic layer from the wall of a uniformly contracting cavity is considered for the case where a segment of the layer is initially delarmnated and is predeflected due to the presence of a “knife edge imperfection” on the surface of the substrate or equivalently by a point load applied to the layer. A closed form analytical solution is obtained and numerical results are presented demonstrating the influence of the “imperfection” on the phenomenon of interest.