Effect of the plate thickness on the out-of-plane displacement field of a cracked elastic plate loaded in mode I

Abstract

The paper presents analytical results on the out-of-plane displacement of the lateral surface of a plate in the vicinity of a through-the-thickness crack at different ratios of the crack length to the plate thickness. The theoretical approach is based on a recently developed three-dimensional elastic solution for an edge dislocation in a plate of arbitrary thickness and the standard distributed dislocation technique. It was shown that the results obtained in this paper mirror classical plane stress and plan strain solutions in limiting cases of very thin and very thick plates, respectively and agree well with experimental investigations carried out using a Michelson interferometer. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.