Characterisation of crack tip stresses in elastic-perfectly plastic material under mode-I loading

Asymptotic crack tip stress fields are developed for a stationary plane strain crack in incompressible elastic-perfectly plastic material under mode-I loading. Detailed investigations have revealed that in between the two extreme conditions of crack tip constraint, that is, between the fully plastic Prandtl [1] field and the uniform stress field the most general elastic–plastic crack tip fields can be completely described by the 5-sector stress solution proposed in this article. The 3-sector stress field proposed by Li and Hancock [2] and the 4-sector field proposed by Zhu and Chao [3] are subsets of the general elastic–plastic field proposed in this work. This study has revealed that cases arise where the severe loss of crack tip constraint can lead to compressive yielding of crack flank. This particular situation leads to 5-sector stress field. Detailed studies have revealed that, in the most general case of elastic–plastic crack tip fields, the Tπ parameter proposed by Zhu and Chao [3] cannot be used as a constraint parameter to represent a unique state of stress at the crack tip. A new constraint-indexing parameter TCS-2 is proposed, which along with Tp is capable of representing the entire elastic–plastic crack tip stress fields over all angles around a crack tip. Excellent agreement is obtained between the proposed asymptotic crack tip stress field and the full-field finite element results for constraint levels ranging from high to low. It is demonstrated that the proposed constraint parameters are adequate to represent the crack tip constraint arising due to specimen geometry and loading conditions as well as the additional constraint that arises due to weld strength mismatch.