Estimation of stress field near notch root of 3-dimensional actual structure with some strain gages and the body force method (1st report, proposal of analytical method)

In this paper, a method of estimating the stress fields with strain gage's outputs and the body force method (BFM) is proposed. A notch of 3-dimensional structure surface is considered as an observed domain. The observed domain is treated as a pseudo-3-dimensional plate, not a part of a 3-dimensional body. In other words, body force is distributed along the observed domain to add the 3-dimensional influence to a plane stress problem. In this paper, the result due to the elastic FEM analysis is used instead of strain gage's outputs on real structures. A self-assessment criterion is proposed. In addition, it is possible to obtain the stress value at the 10% error by the self-assessment of the result due to the present method. In the second report, the present method will be applied to crack detection.