Elastic Analysis of Crack Stability under Shear Loading Modes

The main goal of this thesis is to create a numerical simulation of a real experiment for specifying the ultimate state of spread of fatigue crack in pure shear stress modes and to deal with results of simulations for different specimen geometries. The simulations emulate real conditions of the experiment within the frame of linear elastic fracture mechanics. The first part of this work discusses a number of approaches to describe the stability and behaviour of cracks. The second part of this thesis deals with several possibilities of calculating crack characteristics employing ANSYS software. The third and most comprehensive part of the thesis describes the experiment which served as the template for the calculations. In addition, the setup of the simulations and the post-processing of the results for different crack parameters are discussed