Effects of lateral load on warm prestressing in a center crack plate

The load bearing capacity of cracked components increases if an appropriate compressive residual stress field is created near the crack tip. Warm prestressing is a well-known technique for introducing such a residual stress field. In this paper, the finite element method is used to study the effect of the load applied parallel to the crack (or the lateral load) in warm prestressing of a cracked specimen. The specimen is a square plate containing a center crack and the lateral load is applied in the preloading stage. The numerical results suggest that the lateral load in the preloading stage can influence significantly the apparent fracture toughness after the warm prestressing. It is shown that the improvement in the apparent fracture toughness due to a compressive lateral load is more significant than the improvement due to a tensile lateral load.