Reinvestigation of Elastic-Plastic Growth of Mode III Cracks in Power Law Hardening Materials

This work deals with asymptotic analysis of near tip fields for mode III cracks growing quasi-statically in steady in power law hardening materials. In the analysis the stress expansion originally suggested by Gao and Hwang was modified. Attention was focused on the behavior of the asymptotic solutions as hardening exponent n→∞. Analytical expressions of the dominant terms of deformation velocity and flow factor in the centered fan sector have been obtained by expanding them in series of the small parameter s=2/(n-1). Results showed that the asymptotic solution of near tip fields for power hardening materials goes, as → ∞, to its corresponding solution for elastic-perfectly plastic materials.