Stress Distribution Analysis on a Steel Bar with Two Discontinuities Using Finite Element Method

Engineers are interested to know the maximum stress in a under load member, since the main concern is to determine whether the allowable stress will be exceeded. In this paper, a steel bar with two different holes subjected to an axial load was analyzed using Finite Element Method (FEM). The distribution of stress showed that high localized stresses occur near the holes in angle of 90º to longitudinal axis and the maximum stress was found near the bigger hole. This results were compared to the analytical solution and there is an acceptable precision with less than 3% error. It was also confirmed that the length of the bar had no effect on the results. As an important result, when the distance of the holes decreased, the maximum stress on the smaller hole was affected by the bigger one and this is different from obtained results for single-hole bars.