The precise and new analysis for a mode III growing crack in an elastic-perfectly plastic solid

Abstract

The near crack line field analysis method has been used to investigate into Mode III quasistatically propagating crack in an elastic-perfectly plastic material. The significance of this paper is that the usual small scale yielding theory has been broken through. By obtaining the general solutions of the stresses and the displacement rate of the near crack line plastic region, and by matching the general solutions with the precise elastic fields (not the usual elastic K-dominant fields) at the elastic-plastic boundary, the precise and new solutions of the stress and deformation fields, the size of the plastic region and the unit normal vector of the elastic-plastic boundary have been obtained near the crack line. The solutions of this paper are sufficiently precise near the crack line region because the roughly qualitative assumptions of the small scale yielding theory have not been used and no other roughly qualitative assumptions have been taken, either. The analysis of this paper shows that the assumingly “steady-state case” for stable crack growth, which has been discussed attentively in previous works, do not exist, and the plastic strains near the crack line do not have singularities. Two most important cases for stable crack growth have been discussed.