Extraction of stress intensity factors of biharmonic equations with free boundary conditions on crack faces (III): SIF of a thin plate subjected to the bending moment

Abstract

The plate bending problems in the Kirchhoff–Love model can be reduced to biharmonic equations. In the previous papers (Kim et al., 2020; Kim et al., 2022), we derived stress intensity factors (SIF) extraction formulas of a biharmonic equation Δ2u=f in a non-convex (cracked, L-shaped) domain with various boundary conditions such as clamped, simply connected, free, and mixed. In previous papers, we could not show a general SIF formula related to Poisson’s ratio ν contained in the free boundary condition. Moreover, the previous SIF extraction formula obtained for a given Poisson’s ratio requires cumbersome line integrals. In this paper, removing the line integrals in the extraction formulas, we show improved SIF extraction formulas applicable to biharmonic equations with free boundary conditions. Thus, the new, improved SIF extraction formulas for free boundary conditions become more straightforward and can be applied to plate bending problems.