Effective stress assessment at rectangular rounded lateral notches

Rectangular lateral notches are not common engineering components, thus little research attention has been directed towards the investigation of their stress field properties. Indeed, no in-depth investigations have been conducted to date to assess their effective stress distributions according to the effective stress definitions provided by more recent non-local approaches (i.e. critical distance, average values, implicit gradient values, etc.). In fact, the potential applications of this kind of investigation are not even particularly relevant. However, rectangular notches could provide an interesting theoretical and experimental benchmark or reference case in order to validate the effective stress definitions. The aim of this paper is to investigate the linear elastic stress field at edges, corners and in the surrounding material of rectangular, sharp or rounded lateral notches. The consequent effective values of these notches are evaluated in relation to brittle fracture or their predicted fatigue strength values. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between geometrical proportions and the location of critical failure points according to the definitions of effective stress proposed in the literature.