Compressibility of Two-Dimensional Cavities of Various Shapes

Abstract

Muskhelishvili-Kolosov complex stress functions are used to find the stresses and displacements around two-dimensional cavities under plane strain or plane stress. The boundary conditions considered are either uniform pressure at the cavity surface with vanishing stresses at infinity, or a traction-free cavity surface with uniform biaxial compression at infinity. A closed-form solution is obtained for the case where the mapping function from the interior of the unit circle to the region outside of the cavity has a finite number of terms. The area change of the cavity due to hydrostatic compression at infinity is examined for a variety of shapes, and is found to correlate closely with the square of the perimeter of the hole.