The integrity assessment of an engineering structure or member, for instance criteria and fatigue-life predictions, necessitates the knowledge of the full-field individual components of stress, strain and/or displacement. Evaluating these using analytical or numerical techniques can be difficult or impossible for finite structures, contact problems, or if the material properties, loading or boundary conditions are unknown. Such information is often unavailable in practice so as to necessitate experimental approach to capture the exact boundary and loading conditions of the structure. However, extracting individual stress, strain and/or displacement information in the locality of geometric cutouts by purely experimental methods can be difficult and in most cases impossible and often suffer from bad, and in some cases, unavailable results at and close to the edges of cutouts. Combining (or hybridizing) experimental information with analytical and numerical tools enables one to solve aforementioned situations. For example, thermoelastic stress analysis (TSA) is combined with an Airy stress function to stress analyze an orthotropic composite containing an elliptical hole, a rectangular plate subjected to a concentrated edged-load with a near edge hole and a finite plate with a deep U-notch. Utilizing Digital Image Correlation (DIC), values of single displacement component are used here to determine full-field individual components of stresses and displacements in a notched orthotropic composite without explicitly differentiating the measured displacements. The analytical ingredient of this hybrid approach consists of using the Airy stress function which is based on the mechanics foundations of compatibility and equilibrium. The study also emphasizes on reducing stress concentrations and on increasing strength in a side-notched finite-width orthotropic plate by reducing the adjacent structural stiffness through introducing nearby auxiliary notches. The stress and strain concentration factors for a thick plate with a circular hole were also investigated using three-dimensional finite element analysis. Bone surrogate which mimics the bone in strength and geometry were tested experimentally using 3- and 4-point bending and DIC.

The major contribution of this thesis is the demonstrated ability to combine experimental, numerical and analytical techniques for the full-field determination of the separate components of stress, strain, and displacement at and in the neighborhood of the cutouts in various loaded components and structures, with different boundary and loading conditions.