Photoelastic determination of mixed-mode stress intensity factors for inclined semi-circular cracks in thin tubes

Abstract Metal shims have been used to produce internal and external, semicircular, surface, crack-like flaws in cast, photoelastic models of thin tubes. The effects of crack depth, crack orientation, crack inclination, and crack position (i.e., internal or external) have been determined from the analysis of results from 69 slices taken from 24 ‘crack’ types. It has been shown that by taking eleven terms in the solutions for the crack-tip stress fields, rather than taking only the singular solution, more accurate stress-intensity factors are obtained.