An Analytical Formulation for the Plastic Deformation at the Tip of Short Cracks

Plastic zone size at the tip of a crack strictly depends upon many variables, such as yield stress of material, load conditions, crack size and component thickness, but an exact analytical solution for PZS such as to consider all these parameters is not yet available, mainly because of the difficulties in computing the stress-strain field ahead of the tip of a growing crack, in particular if the crack can be classified as a short one, for which case the PZS can be very large respect to the crack dimensions. By using a parametric 3D finite element model, numerical analyses have been developed under Ansys (R) and Warp3D (R) FE codes with the aim to derive an analytical relationship between the PZS and the aforesaid parameters. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of ICM11