The effect of a stiffener in a cracked plate under skew-symmetric loading

In the last two decades the determination of the effect of a reinforcing element on the stress intensity factors has attracted considerable attention. In particular, Greif and Sanders (1965) have investigated the effect of a stiffener on a cracked plate by using the theory of plane stress. The special case of the same problem in which the crack tip terminates at the stiffener has been studied by Yahsi and Erdogan (1983) . Recently, Yahsi and Shahid (1986) have investigated the problem of a stiffened plate containing a through crack under uniform bending load. They formulated the problem for a specially orthotropic material by using Reissner’s plate theory.