A development on plastic work methods for determining the plastic load for mechanical components and structures

Abstract

This paper revisits and discusses some of the methods found in literature for determining the plastic load for the prevention of excessive deformation of a component under the action of a monotonically increasing load. The literature discussion concentrates on advantages and challenges when using the existing plastic load determination methods. In this paper, the authors present a novel method as a development from literature that suggests that the ratio of plastic work and elastic work induced under the action of a monotonically increasing load can be used to determine the plastic load of a component. The proposed new method is applied to a number of test case examples and the results are compared with those obtained using the methods found from literature. The benefits of adopting the novel method are discussed at the end of the paper.