It is shown that if the displacement field and stress intensity factor are known as functions of crack length for any symmetrical load system acting on a linear elastic body in plane strain, then the stress intensity factor for any other symmetrical load system whatsoever on the same body may be directly determined. The result is closely related to Bueckner's [1] "weight function". through whic...

This paper is devoted to the characterization of the energy release rate of a crack which is merely closed, connected, and with density 1/2 at the tip. First, the blow-up limit of the displacement is analyzed, and the convergence to the corresponding positively 1/2-homogenous function in the cracked plane is established. Then, the energy release rate is obtained as the derivative of the elastic...

When a blunt cutting tool is forced through a thin elastic sheet that is held along its lateral boundaries, a strikingly regular wavy cut can be left behind, examples of which are presented in Fig. 1. The thin film is brittle, hence it undergoes negligible irreversible deformation besides fracture. For tools much wider than the film’s thickness, the crack tip follows a highly reproducible nonsi...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of slant fracture observed in stable tearing tests of many ductile materials, where an initially flat crack, loaded under remote Mode I conditions, tends to grow into a slant crack and stay in the slant configuration until final fracture. In an effort to identify potential reasons why cracks prefer to grow in a slant manner, three-dimensional finite elemen...

Fatigue cracking is one of the most common failure modes of various load-bearing structures. Even though sensors of many different types have been developed for crack detection, very few can monitor crack growth with a high sensitivity. This paper presents an antenna sensor that is capable of monitoring the growth of fatigue cracks with a sub-millimeter resolution. According to microstrip patch...

An exact dynamic 2D solution for a concentrated force near a stationary semi-infinite crack in an unbounded plane can be used in the transient analysis of wave-scattering problems. Direct approaches to obtaining the solution, however, are complicated by the existence of a characteristic length. A less direct approach is used here which circumvents these complications. As an example, the dynamic...

A first order diffraction analysis of an optical interferometer, Coherent Gradient Sensor (CGS), for measuring surface gradients is presented. Its applicability in the field of fracture mechanics is demonstrated by quantitatively measuring the gradients of out-of-plane displacements around a crack tip in a three point bent fracture specimen under static loading. This method has potential for th...

The Magneto-Electro-Elastic (MEE) material exhibits pyroelectric and pyromagnetic effects under thermal environment. The effects of such pyroelectric and pyromagnetic behavior on vibration, buckling and deflection analysis of partially cracked thin MEE plate is presented and discussed in this paper. The aim of the study is to develop an analytical model for the vibration and geometrically linea...