ON UNCONTROLLED FRACTURE OF THIN PLATES DURING THERMAL BEAM CUTTING

Thermal beam cutting of thin plates is gaining applications in enginee ring practice. One associated problem, however, is the uncontrolled fr acture of plates made of brittle materials. Based on the temperature a nd thermal stress distributions, we obtain the expressions for the max imum tensile stress and the effective stress intensity factor. Consequ ently, we propose two fracture initiation criteria for the process.