Finite strain analysis of crack tip fields in incompressible hyperelastic solids loaded in plane stress

A new method is developed to determine the dominant asymptotic stress and deformation fields near the tip of a Mode-I traction free plane stress crack. The analysis is based on the fully nonlinear equilibrium theory of incompressible hyperelastic solids. We show that the dominant singularity of the near tip stress field is governed by the asymptotic solution of a linear second order ordinary differential equation. Our method is applicable to any hyperelastic material with a smooth work function that depends only on the trace of the Cauchy–Green tensor and is particularly useful for materials that exhibit severe strain hardening. We apply this method to study two types of soft materials: generalized neo-Hookean solids and a solid that hardens exponentially. For the generalized neo-Hookean solids, our method is able to resolve a difficulty in the previous work by Geubelle and Knauss (1994a). Our theoretical results are compared with finite element simulations.