Singular behaviour at the end of a tensile crack in a hardening material

Distributions of stress occurring at the tip of a crack in a tension field are presented for both plane stress and plane strain. A total deformation theory of plasticity, in conjunction with two hardening stress-strain relations, is used. For applied stress sufficiently low such that the plastic zone is very small relative to the crack length, the dominant singularity can be completely determined with the aid of a path-independent line integral recently given by rice (1967). The amplitude of the tensile stress singularity ahead of the crack is found to be larger in plane strain than in plane stress.