A rigid-plastic analysis of the limiting equilibrium of an edge cleavage crack in a rectangular plate

The analytic solution of the plane rigid-plastic problem of an edge cleavage crack parallel to the base of a rectangular plate is constructed. The geometry of the domain and the loading conditions (concentrated loads acting along a normal to the crack line) simulate a widely used scheme of experiments for determining the crack resistance of materials. The solution of the problem leads to a scheme for the how of the material ahead of the crack which is accompanied by the formulation of a transverse microcrack. A variational principle for problems of rigid-plastic analysis, taking into account formation of cracks, formulated and proved in [1], is used to solve the problem. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.