Fully Plastic Solutions and Large Scale Yielding Estimates for Plane Stress Crack Problems

Fully plastic plane stress solutions are given for a center-cracked strip in tension and an edge-cracked strip in pure bending. In the fully plastic formulation the material is characterized by a pure power hardening stress-strain relation which reduces at one limit to linear elasticity and at the other to rigid/perfect plasticity. Simple formulas are given for estimating the J-integral, the load-point displacement and the crack opening displacement in terms of the applied load for strain hardening materials characterized by the Ramberg-Osgood stress-strain relation in tension. The formulas make use of the linear elastic solution and the fully plastic solution to interpolate over the entire range of small and large scale yielding. The accuracy of the formulas is assessed using finite element calculations for some specific configurations.