LAUSR

Abstract With the aid of some explicit formulas of the elastic stress fields at the neighborhood of U- and blunt V-shaped notches and also using the Tresca and Von-Mises yield criteria, the plastic zone size at the neighborhood of such notches under mode I loading and plane-stress/strain conditions is determined by extending Irwin’s model. Then, for verifying the analytical results, elastic-plastic finite element analyses are done on some notched specimens and the corresponding numerical results are compared with the analytical estimations. It is shown that for the most cases, the effective plastic zone size, which is necessary for determining the type of ductile failure, can be successfully estimated by using the proposed analytical formulas. In addition, due to lack of accuracy of the analytical stress fields used in this study, the shapes of the plastic zones obtained by the analytical and numerical methods are not identical for most cases. It is also revealed that by using the analytical method based on the linear elastic solution instead of the elastic-plastic solutions, which are complicated and time-consuming, the effective plastic zone size at the neighborhood of blunt notches can be determined rapidly and conveniently.