Equation 3 · Why Materials Fail: Fracture, Flaws and the Inspection Interval
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Symbol sigma_infty
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The first half of the argument is purely elastic and predates Griffith. An elliptical hole in a stressed plate does not merely remove load-bearing material; it redistributes the stress that would have passed through that material into the region around the hole’s sharpest curvature. For an elliptical flaw of half-length a and tip radius of curvature in a plate under remote tension , the peak stress at the tip is approximately
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