Elastic and Elastic-Plastic Behaviour of a Crack in a Residual Stress Field

The behaviour of a crack in the centre of a plate subject to a far-field stress has been studied where the plate contains an initial residual stress. Elastic and elastic-plastic conditions have been considered. For elastic conditions a series of analyses based on stress intensity factor solutions have been developed to calculate the state of opening and the stress intensity factor for cracks of different lengths relative to the size of the residual stress field and different magnitudes of applied stress relative to the magnitude of the residual stress. For elastic-plastic conditions a strip yield model has been used to develop a similar set of analyses. The results of these analyses compare closely with those of finite element modelling.