Determination of stress intensity factors in cracked plates by the finite element method

Stress fields near crack tips in an elastic body can be specified by the stress intensity factors which are closely related to the stress singularities arising from the crack tips. These singularities, however, cannot be represented exactly by conventional finite element models. A new method for the analysis of stresses around cracks is proposed in this paper on the basis of the superposition of analytical and finite element solutions. This method is applied to several two-dimensional problems whose solutions are obtained analytically, and it is shown that their numerical results are in excellent agreement with analytical ones. Sufficiently accurate results can be obtained by the conventional finite element analysis with rather coarse mesh subdivision. Computational efforts are then considerably reduced compared with other methods.