| Structures having irregularly-shaped notches or holes are becoming quite abundant in engineering structures. The most significant stresses frequently occur at geometric discontinuities and thereby influencing structural integrity. Theoretical solutions are seldom available for finite geometries, and like numerical methods, they require accurate knowledge of the external loads and boundary conditions. Such information is often unavailable in practice so as to necessitate an experimental approach. However, extracting individual stress, strain or displacement information in the locality of irregularly-shaped cutouts by purely experimental methods can be difficult and in most cases impossible. The aforementioned challenges of being able to accurately perform full-field analysis of structures with irregularly-shaped cutouts is overcome here by hybridizing measured experimental data with analytical tools as well as imposing appropriate boundary conditions. Presently employed full-field experimental procedures include the Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA) and Digital Image Correlation (DIC) methods. The analytical ingredient of this hybrid approach consists of using the Airy stress function which is based on the mechanics foundations of compatibility and equilibrium. The full-field hybrid results determined for the different scenarios are compared against those from finite element analysis (FEA) and strain gage measurements.;The major contribution of this thesis is the demonstrated ability to combine experimental, numerical and analytical techniques for the full-field determination of the separate components of stress, strain, and displacement at and in the neighborhood of irregularly-shaped cutouts in various loaded components and structures, with different boundary and loading conditions. |
