The Interaction of a crack with rigid circular cylindrical inclusions is considered for the case of longitudinal shear deformation. General representations of the solutions for a radial crack near a single and midway between two inclusions are given. The particular case of uniform shearing stress applied at infinity is discussed in detail. Expressions for the crack tip stress intensity factor K...

Two levels of fidelity are used for minimum weight design of a composite bladestiffened panel subject to crack propagation constraints. The low fidelity approach makes use of an equivalent strain constraint calculated by a closed form solution for the stress intensity factor. The high fidelity approach uses the stress intensity factor directly as the constraint and computes it from the stress d...

In this study, single-edge cracked uniaxial specimens with an initial crack length of 0.1 in or 0.3 in and wedge-shaped sheet specimens with an initial crack length of 0.3 in were tested at a constant displacement rate of 50 in/min under 1000 psi confining pressure. The specimens were made of a highly filled polymeric material, containing 86% by weight of hard particles embedded in a rubbery ma...

The polychaete Nereis virens burrows through muddy sediments by exerting dorsoventral forces against the walls of its tongue-depressor-shaped burrow to extend an oblate hemispheroidal crack. Stress is concentrated at the crack tip, which extends when the stress intensity factor (KI) exceeds the critical stress intensity factor (KIc). Relevant forces were measured in gelatin, an analog for elast...

the cracked brazilian disc (cbd) specimen is widely used in order to determine mode-i/ii and mixed-mode fracture toughness of a rock medium. in this study, the stress intensity factor (sif) on the crack-tip in this specimen is calculated for various geometrical crack conditions using the extended-finite element method (x-fem). this method is based upon the finite element method (fem). in this m...

Recent work (Rice, 1985a) has presented the calculations of the first order variation in an elastic displacement field associated with arbitrary incremental planar advance of the location of the front of a half-plane crack in a loaded elastic full space. That work also indicated the relation of such calculations to a three-dimensional weight function theory for crack analysis and derived an exp...

Flaws in material, appearing because of imperfections, manufacturing faults or severe service conditions, can easily threaten the structural integrity of engineering components. This is particularly dangerous when concerning equipment whose purpose is to protect larger systems, e.g. pressure safety valves (PSV) that protect pressure vessels and equipment of overpressure. Catastrophic consequenc...