Stress singularities at crack corners

Abstract

In this thesis the stress and displacement fields near an embedded crack corner in a linear elastic medium are analytically computed. The conical-spherical coordinate system is introduced to solve this problem. It is observed that the strength of the stress singularity is dependent on the angle of the crack corner. The singularity becomes weaker, varying from r⁻¹ to r⁰, as the angle of the crack corner varies from 360° to 0°. Both symmetric and skew-symmetric loadings give the same variation of the behavior of the stress singularity. It is also observed that the order of the singularity is independent of Poisson's ratio, unlike the corner cracks at a free surface where Poisson's ratio sects the results.