Open Circular Hole in a Finite Plate Under Tension Treated by Airy Stress Function Method

Open circular holes are an essential design feature and are often placed in narrowplates for reasons of limited space raising high stress concentrations. To create lightweight optimal structures precise analysis tools are vital, which can be based on analytical means providing efficient computation. That is why focus of the present paper is the determination of the stress field for the isotropic finite-width open-hole problem under uniform tension using the Airy stress function. This is performed by taking the stress field of corresponding infinite domain problem and supplementing it with auxiliary functions enabling to continuously model traction-free edges. The results are eventually validated against Finite Element analyses.