Stresses in an Elastic Thick Plate with a Spherical Cavity Under Transverse Bending

Abstract

This paper contains a three-dimensional solution for the stresses and deformations arising in an elastic thick plate with a symmetrically located spherical cavity under transverse bending. The solution is represented by a combination of the solution which is regular in the outside of a spherical cavity and the solution which is regular in the infinite thick plate, and is deduced with the aid of the six stress functions used in the authors, previous papers. Numerical results are given when the ratios of cavity diameter to plate thickness are 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.7 and the stress distributions around a spherical cavity are shown graphically. Comparison is made between the axisymmetric solutions obtained by C. B. Ling et al. and ours.