Plane stress crack-line fields for crack growth in an elastic perfectly-plastic material

Mode-I crack growth in an elastic perfectly-plastic material under conditions of generalized plane stress has been investigated. In the plastic loading zone, near the plane of the crack, the stresses and strains have been expanded in powers of the distance, y, to the crack line. Substitution of the expansions in the equilibrium equations, the yield condition and the constitutive equations yields a system of simple ordinary differential equations for the coefficients of the expansions. This system is solvable if it is assumed that the cleavage stress is uniform on the crack line. By matching the relevant stress components and particle velocities to the dominant terms of appropriate elastic fields at the elastic-plastic boundary, a complete solution has been obtained for ε{lunate}_y in the plane of the crack. The solution depends on crack-line position and time, and applies from the propagating crack tip up to the moving elastic-plastic boundary. Numerical results are presented for the edge crack geometry.