• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.38 no.12
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• pp.1441-1446
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• 2014

In the present paper, the effects of the thickness and width of a curved wide-plate, the crack length, and the strain hardening exponent on the crack-tip constraint of the curved wide-plate were investigated. To accomplish this, detailed three-dimensional elastic-plastic finite element (FE) analyses were performed considering various geometric and material variables. The material was characterized by the Ramberg-Osgood relationship, and the Q-stress was employed as a crack-tip constraint parameter. Based on the present FE results, the variations in the Q-stress of the curved wide-plate with the geometric variables and material properties were evaluated. This revealed that the effect of out-of-plane constraint conditions on the crack-tip constraint was closely related to the in-plane constraint conditions, and out-of-plane constraint conditions affected the crack-tip constraint more than in-plane constraint conditions.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.51-68
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• 2004

Since the linear elastic fracture analysis has been proved to be insufficient in predicting the failure of strain hardening materials, a number of fracture concepts have been studied which remain applicable in the presence of plasticity near a crack tip. This work thereby presents a new finite element model to predict the elastic-plastic crack-tip field and fatigue life of center-cracked panels(CCP) with ductile fracture under large-scale yielding conditions. Also, this study has been carried out to investigate the path-dependence of J-integral within the plastic zone for elastic-perfectly plastic, bilinear elastic-plastic, and nonlinear elastic-plastic materials. Based on the incremental theory of plasticity, the p-version finite element is employed to account for the accurate values of J-integral, the most dominant fracture parameter, and the shape of plastic zone near a crack tip by using the J-integral method. To predict the fatigue life, the conventional Paris law has been modified by substituting the range of J-value denoted by ${\Delta}J$ for ${\Delta}K$. The experimental fatigue test is conducted with five CCP specimens to validate the accuracy of the proposed model. It is noted that the relationship between the crack length a and ${\Delta}K$ in LEFM analysis shows a strong linearity, on the other hand, the nonlinear relationship between a and ${\Delta}J$ is detected in EPFM analysis. Therefore, this trend will be depended especially in the case of large scale yielding. The numerical results by the proposed model are compared with the theoretical solutions in literatures, experimental results, and the numerical solutions by the conventional h-version of the finite element method.