CTOD for the through-the-thickness crack in a plate of arbitrary thickness

The sectional thickness of plate-like components has a significant influence on the fatigue and fracture properties. This effect is primarily due to the differences in the through-the-thickness stresses prevailing at the tip of a crack in a finite-thickness plate or shell. Characterization of this effect to date has remained largely empirical. The current paper presents new analytical results for CTOD for the through-the-thickness crack in infinite plates with various thicknesses. These results are based on a recently developed solution for an edge dislocation in infinite plate of arbitrary thickness. The analytical predictions of the CTOD and the constraint factor are compared with the three-dimensional FE results. It is shown that the analytical and the numerical results are in good agreement when the numerical calculations are not affected by the size of the FE mesh and by the boundaries of the FE model.