Elastic–plastic dynamic fracture analysis for stationary curved cracks

• The numerical solutions presented in this paper provide attractive features of the integral J^F.
• The present results may be useful for future research in elastic–plastic dynamic fracture.
• The integral J^F has been found to maintain very nearly path independence.
• The present study recommends that the integral J^F may be easily correlated to establish failure criteria.

It has been a great challenge for many scientists and engineers to compute elastic–plastic solutions for dynamically loaded cracked structures due to the fact that the solutions are much more complicated and computationally time consuming than corresponding static problems. The path independent integral J^F, originally developed for a two-dimensional dynamically loaded stationary circular arc crack in a homogeneous and isotropic material, is evaluated in the present study by taking elastic–plastic material properties to quantify the crack problem. All the numerical results presented in this study were evaluated using general purpose finite element commercial software ANSYS together with the post-processing program (using FORTRAN) developed by the authors. Numerical results thus obtained are compared with good agreement within the limits of computational accuracy and the path invariant property of J^F is well preserved over the integration contours.