A ring-shaped plastic zone at an elliptic crack under triaxial axisymmetric loading

The paper addresses a three-dimensional problem for an elliptic crack with a ring plastic zone under uni- and triaxial loading at infinity. The normal stresses in the plastic zone are found from the conditions that the stresses are constrained and the plane strain is local and from the yield criterion for the given material. The size of the elliptic ring is calculated by Rice's variational formula. It is shown that the constraint ratio for plastic strains under triaxial loading may be greater than that under loads close to hydrostatic tension. The contour of the plastic zone is confocal to the initial crack.