Reconsidering the Paradox of Rice for a Linear Strain Hardening Material

Rice (1966) considered a growing crack in an elastic-plastic material where the flow strength saturates, and demonstrated that there is no energy available for the propagation. This is the famous «Paradox of Rice». Kfouri and Miller (1976) confirmed this result using an elastic-plastic finite element solution for an linear strain hardening material. We show in this paper that the result of Kfouri and Miller is questionable.