Experimental stress determination of blunt notches under combinations of modes I and II loading

Abstract

An appropriate evaluation of the stress field for designing new or optimizing existing engineering structures is required. The primary goal of this paper is to use the digital image correlation (DIC) approach to ascertain the stress field around the root of various blunt notches. At first, extensive tests were performed using the Brazilian Disc (BD) specimen containing three distinct notches (U, VO, and Keyhole) under diverse loading conditions, including pure mode I, pure mode II, and mixed-mode I/II. The displacement fields output from the DIC experiments were employed as the input data for a computer program, and the coefficients of the stress and displacement fields were then determined utilizing the over-deterministic technique. Afterward, the computed coefficients were used to calculate the analytical stress field around the notch root by considering singular and higher-order terms for each notch type. Subsequently, the finite element (FE) method was employed to verify the accuracy of the stress field obtained from the DIC experiments. In addition, the influence of some major parameters such as notch opening angle, notch tip radius, and geometry on the stress distribution was investigated. This study validated the efficiency of the DIC approach in determining the unknown stress coefficients of rounded notches, especially the first non-singular term of the stress expansion, which is revealed to have a considerable impact on appraising the exact stress field around the notch curvature.