THERMAL SHOCK FRACTURE IN AN EDGE-CRACKED PLATE

In this paper the transient thermal stress problem for an elastic strip with an edge crack is investigated. The elastic medium is assumed to be insulated on one face and cooled by surface convection on the face contaning the edge crack. Using the principle of superposition, the formulation results in a mixed boundary value problem, with the thermal stresses calculated from the thermoelasticity solution for an uncracked strip utilized as the necessary crack surface tractions. The resulting singular integral equation is of a well-known type and is solved numerically. In this paper, inertia effects are assumed negligible and possible temperature dependence of thermoelastic constants is not considered. The numerical results presented, include the stress intensity factor as a function of nondimensional time (Fourier number) and crack length, for various values of the dimensionless Biot number. The temperature distribution and the thermal stresses in the uncracked strip are also included. The time lag, which occurs between the time at which the stress on the surface of the strip is a maximum and the time when a maximum occurs in the stress intensity factor, is clearly shown to be a function of the Biot number for any given ratio of crack length to strip thickness. A result of particular interest is the degree with which the maximum stress intensity factor decreases, as a function of crack length, for decreasing values of the Biot number.