Reference stress solutions for plates with embedded off-set elliptical cracks under combined biaxial forces and cross-thickness bending

The reference stress solutions for plates with embedded off-set elliptical cracks under combined biaxial forces and cross-thickness bending are derived based on the Mises yield criterion and net-section collapse principle. The newly developed reference stress solutions are compared with the reference stresses of plates with embedded rectangular cracks evaluated using the available limit load solutions. The developed reference stress solutions have been used to predict J via the reference stress J scheme. Elastic-plastic 3-D finite element (FE) analyses are used to calculate J values along the crack front and the results are compared with the reference stress predictions. The results show that the estimated J values based on the reference stress method with the reference stress solutions developed in this paper are very close to the FE J values, but the predictions may be non-conservative. However, the non-conservatism could be removed by simply applying a constant factor less than 1 to the reference stress solutions when they are used in the reference stress J scheme.