RADIAL DEPENDENCE OF NEAR-TIP CONTINUUM FIELDS FOR PLANE-STRAIN TENSILE CRACK-GROWTH IN ELASTIC-IDEALLY PLASTIC SOLIDS

The paper is an extension of work by Drugan et al. (1982) who derive the stress and deformation fields at the tip of a plane strain tensile crack that grows quasi-statically, under general nonsteady conditions, in an elastic-ideally plastic solid. A higher-order analysis of the near-tip fields for this growing crack problem is performed. Principal objectives are to determine the radial variation of the near-tip stress field and elucidate the structure of the deformation fields in the 90-deg sector ahead of the growing crack. The analysis presented differs from typical perturbation analyses in that the author is able to derive the higher-order structure of the continuum fields rather than having to assume expansions for them.