The Part-Through Surface Crack in an Elastic Plate

An elastic analysis is presented for the tensile stretching and bending of a plate containing a surface crack penetrating part-through the thickness, Fig. 1. The treatment is approximate, in that the two-dimensional generalized plane stress and Kirchhoff-Poisson plate bending theories are employed, with the part-through cracked section represented as a continuous line spring. The spring has both stretching and bending resistance, its compliance coefficients being chosen to match those of an edge cracked strip in plane strain. The mathematical formulation reduces finally to two-coupled integral equations for the thickness averaged force and moment per unit length along the cracked section. These are solved numerically for the case of a semi-elliptical part-through crack, with results compared to a simple but approximate closed-form solution. Extensive results are given for the stress intensity factor at the midpoint of the part-through crack for both remote tensile and bending loads on the plate. These results indicate that the stress-intensity factor is substantially lower, in general, than for a similarly loaded strip in plane strain with a crack of the same depth.