Weight Functions for T-Stress for Edge Cracks in Thick-Walled Cylinders Available to Purchase

This paper presents T-stress solutions for an internal edge crack in thick-walled cylinders under complex stress distributions. First, the background of the weight function method for the calculation of T-stress is discussed. Then the T-stress results for edge-cracked cylinders obtained from extensive boundary element analyses are summarized. The crack geometries analyzed cover a wide range of radius ratios and relative crack lengths. The loading cases considered in the BEM analysis for the cracked cylinder are: i) crack face pressures with polynomial stress distributions acting on the crack face and ii) internal pressure or steady state thermal loading in the cylinder. Then, the T-stress results for uniform and linearly varying crack face pressure cases are used as the reference solutions to derive weight functions for T-stress. Boundary element results of T-stress for other nonlinear stress distributions are used to validate the derived T-stress weight functions. Excellent accuracy has been achieved. The weight functions derived are suitable for obtaining T-stress solutions for thick-walled cylinders with an internal edge crack under any complex stress fields.