Deformations and Stress Intensities Due to a Craze in an Extended Elastic Material

Abstract

This paper presents an analytical solution, accompanied by a numerical scheme, to determine the displacement and stress fields in an extended elastic medium due to a thin craze of finite length directed transversely to the load at infinity. Crazes are thin elongated defects containing fine fibrils that connect their opposite interfaces. These fibrils are modeled as a distributed spring, leading to a formulation in terms of a singular integrodifferential equation. The paper also contains a treatment of central cracks within the craze and time-dependent craze response, and includes a discussion of “tip zone” correction.