Plane strain elastic-ideally plastic crack fields for mode I quasistatic growth at large-scale yielding. I: A new family of analytical solutions (Q1116739)

In an effort to extend the theoretical foundations for understanding and quantitatively describing stable plane strain tensile crack growth in ductile materials to large-scale and general yielding situations, we derive a new family of solutions for the near-tip stress and deformation fields of such growing cracks, within the most analytically tractable model of isotropic, incompressible, elastic-ideally plastic Prandtl- Reuss-Mises material. One limiting member of this new family is the previously-derived ``modified Prandtl field'' solution that is believed to apply under small-scale yielding conditions. We provide evidence that the present solution family, which involves a parameter that is unspecified by the near-tip analysis, may be able to describe growing crack fields for the entire range of yielding extent from small-scale through general yielding conditions in potentially arbitrary Mode I plane strain geometries. Except for the ``modified Prandtl field'' limiting case, all members of the new solution family exhibit: (i) singular straining in the ``constant stress'' plastic sector ahead of the growing crack tip as well as in the ``centered fan'' plastic sectors that lie above and below the growing tip; and (ii) completely continuous near-tip stress and velocity fields. While the solution family derived is the result of a leading-order (in distance, r, from the moving crack tip) asymptotic analysis of the continuum mechanical field equations, we extend this solution explicitly to large r within the region of principal plastic deformation, thereby elucidating the radial dependence of the stress field (not specified by a leading-order analysis in nonhardening materials), and providing a framework for assessing the influence of far-field boundary conditions (specimen geometry and loading) on near-tip fields. Also, the new solution family is shown to provide a natural, fundamentals-based generalization, possibly to arbitrary yielding extent and plastic constraint level, of an existing successful well-contained-yielding ductile crack growth criterion.