Effect of a small hole on the stresses in a uniformly loaded plate
In a paper of the same title Martin Greenspan recently1 determined the stress distribution in a large, uniformly loaded plate weakened by a small hole of an approximately ovaloid shape. Greenspan employed a rather laborious method of piecing together particular solutions of the biharmonic equation for the stress function until all the boundary conditions could be satisfied. This process would become prohibitive in case of more complicated boundary conditions. It is the purpose of this note to apply to the same problem the elegant and more general, yet not well known, method for solving plane problems of elasticity which is most often associated with the name of N. I. Mushelisvili.2