Asymptotic analysis of growing plane strain tensile cracks in elastic-ideally plastic solids

An exact asymptotic analysis is presented of the stress and deformation fields near the tip of a quasistatically advancing plane strain tensile crack in an elastic-ideally plastic solid. In contrast to previous approximate analyses, no assumptions which reduce the yield condition, a priori, to the form of constant in-plane principal shear stress near the crack tip are made, and the analysis is valid for general Poisson ratio ν. Specific results are given for ν = 0.3 and 0.5, the latter duplicating solutions in previous work by L.I. Slepyan, Y.-C. Gao and the present authors. The crack tip field is shown to divide into five angular sectors of four different types ; in the order in which these sweep across a point in the vicinity of the advancing crack, they are : two plastic sectors which can be described asymptotically (i.e., as r → 0, where r is distance from the crack tip) in slip-line terminology as ‘constant stress’ and ‘centered fan’ sectors, respectively ; a plastic sector of non-constant stress which cannot be described asymptotically in terms of slip lines; an elastic unloading sector; and a trailing plastic sector of the same type as that directly preceding the elastic sector. Further, these four different sector types constitute the full set of asymptotically possible solutions at the crack tip. As is known from prior work, the plastic strain accumulated by a material point passing through such a moving ‘centered fan’ sector is O(ln r) as r → 0 ; it is proved in the present work that the plastic strain accumulated by a material point passing through the ‘constant stress’ sector ahead of a growing crack must be less singular than In r as r → 0. As suggested also in earlier studies, the rate of increase of opening gap δ at a point currently at a distance r behind, but very near, the crack tip is given for crack advance under contained yielding by δ ̇ = α J ̇ σ0 +β( σ0 E ) a ̇ ln( R r ) where a is crack length, σ0 is tensile yield strength, E is Young's modulus, J is the value of the J-integral taken in surrounding elastic material, and the parameters α and R are undetermined by the asymptotic analysis. The exact solution for ν = 0.3 gives β = 5.462, which agrees very closely with estimates obtained from finite element solutions. An approximate analysis based on use of slip line representations in all plastic sectors is outlined in the Appendix.