Stress on plates may increase in the neighborhood the edges or the holes for rivets or bolts. Excessive stress concentration may lead to severe breakage of the plates. Thus, it is important to conduct optimization of arrangement of holes at the design stage. In this paper, accuracy of FEM analysis was examined for such stress concentration . By changing the hole size on a narrow plate, change of the stress concentration factor(K) was investigated. Additionally, the same experiment was conducted about series of multiple holes on plate to investigate interaction between the adjacent holes. Then, the FEM results were compared to the reference predictions respectively. Finally, a method by which simple stress concentrating situations can be optimized, will be suggested. This method was examined by FEM, and showed similar tendency with the expectation. Therefore, this method can be valuable when arranging the holes on a plate.

The residual stress analysis and fatigue test of a steel plate with a hole were performed in order to investigate the effects of the cold expansion on the fatigue life of the plate. The cold expansion method is a metal forming process by expanding a hole in order to induce compressive tangential residual stresses near the hole. In this research, a S45C steel plate of 3.2 mm thickness with a hole of 4.318 mm diameter was cold expanded by using a mandrel, resulting in a degree of expansion 1.47%. A significant amount of compressive tangential residual stress of 502 MPa at the hole surface was calculated using the finite element analysis and the compressive residual stress was more widely spreaded in the entry and exit planes than the mid plane in the plate thickness. The compressive tangential residual stresses showed a very beneficial influence on the fatigue life of the plate by increasing 1.2 to 2 times longer lives compared to the plate without cold expansion, depending on the applied load levels. Fatigue crack initiated and propagated at the hole surface of the mandrel entrance region, where relatively lower magnitude of compressive residual stress was found than the other region.

Plates are frequently used in constructing nuclear power plant structures as a structural member. Creating holes in plates, complying with the function, may sometimes is needed. As the buckling may cause the plate to be failed, this study deals with investigating the effects of the thickness of the plate having through holes on its buckling. A range of thicknesses from 1mm to 10mm is considered for the plate to be investigated. Two holes of diameters of 10mm are created in the plate. The load having the magnitude of 1N/m is applied on the left edge of the plate. Both plates with and without holes are investigated. Results showed that thin plates can fail due to geometrical failure while thick plates may fail due to materials failure. The maximum difference in buckling load between the plate with hole and without hole has occurred for the plate having the thickness of 6mm.

A study of fracture to material is getting interest in nuclear and aerospace industry as a viewpoint of safety. Acoustic emission (AE) is a non-destructive testing and new technology to evaluate safety on structures. In previous research continuously, all tensile tests on the pre-defected coupons were performed using the universal testing machine, which machine crosshead was move at a constant speed of 5mm/min. This study is to evaluate an AE source characterization of SM45C steel by using k-nearest neighbor classifier, k-NNC. For this, we used K-means clustering as an unsupervised learning method for obtained multi -variate AE main data sets, and we applied k-NNC as a supervised learning pattern recognition algorithm for obtained multi-variate AE working data sets. As a result, the criteria of Wilk's λ, D&B(Rij) & Tou are discussed.