Introduction
Saint-Venant's principle named after the French elasticity theorist Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venantcan be stated as"... The strains that can be made in a body by the application, to a small section of its surface, of asystem of forces statically approximate to zero force and zero couple, are of negligible magnitude atdistances which are large compared with the linear dimensions of the part."The initial statement was published in French by Saint-Venant in 1855. Although stated verbally the principle is familiar among mechanical engineers in this informal formulation. More presentmathematical literature gives a precise view in the context of partial differential equations. An early participation to this came from von Mises in 1945.The Saint-Venant's principle permits elasticians to replace complex stress distributions or weak boundary conditions into ones that are easier to solve, as long as that boundary is geometrically short.Quite similar to the electrostatics, where the electric field because of the i-th momentum of the load (with 0th being the remaining charge, 1st the dipole, 2nd the quadrupole) decays as over space,Saint-Venant's principle mentions that high order momentum of mechanical load ( momentum withorder higher than torque) decays so quick that they don’t need to be considered for regions far fromthe short boundary. Therefore, the Saint-Venant's principle can be considered as a statement on theasymptotic behavior of the Green's function by a load at point.
Loads must be dispersed over a finite area. In practice it is quite hard to find out accuratestresses close to the point of application of a load. Engineers deal with this problem by applyingSt. Venant's principle which indicates that statically equivalent systems of forces make thesame stresses and strains within a body except in the immediate region where applied loadsare present. Hence, the stresses deduced in the middle of a beam are not affected by the waythe ends are supported as long as the supporting forces and moments are statically alike tothose in the mathematical model. Local problems are dealt with by separate methods.
Aim
When examining a circular hole in a plate, the circular hole in the middle will cause aconcentration of stress. This will increase the level of the stress at specific points near the holeto a value higher than the nominal stress in the rest of the plate. The actual aim of thisinvestigation/ exercise is to find the stress concentration factor at point A on the plate and toget the longitudinal stress profile between the points A & B. It is also necessary to study thevalue of the stress at point C. When carrying out this exercise two different types of elementswould need to be used and a convergence study would need to be performed with eachelement.
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