Stress intensity factor evaluation of a circumferential crack in a finite length thin-walled cylinder for arbitrarily distributed stress on crack surface by weight function method

A weight function to evaluate the stress intensity factor (SIF) of a circumferential crack, subjected to arbitrarily distributed stress on the crack surfaces, in a finite length thin-walled cylinder was derived based on the closed form SIF equation previously developed by the authors. It is easy to evaluate the effects of structural parameters and stress distribution on the SIF with this weight function. Numerical examples confirmed the validity of the weight function. These examples showed that the effect of cylinder length on the SIF is quite large.