Role of elasticity in elastic-plastic fracture

A solution for Model-I plane strain crack tip fields in a bi-linear elastic-plastic material is presented. The elastic-plastic Poisson's ratio is introduced to characterize the influence of elastic deformation on the near tip constraint. Attention is focused on the distribution of elastic/plastic strain energy in the sensitive region of the forward sector ahead of a crack tip. The present study shows that the elastic strain energy can be higher than the plastic strain energy in this sensitive sector while large amount of the plastic strain energy develops outside this sector around the crack tip. The effect of elastic deformation in this sensitive region on the structure of crack-tip fields is considerable and the assumption in some important solutions for crack-tip fields reported in literature that the elastic deformation is small and can be ignored is therefore not physically reasonable. Besides, finite element analysis is carried out to validate the analytical solution and good agreement between them is found. It is seen that the present solution with T-stress can properly describe the crack-tip fields under various constraints for different specimens and an analytical relation is established between the critical value of J-integral, Jc, and T-stress for elastic-plastic fracture.