Stresses at a Re-Entrant Corner of a Plate

The floors of some modern buildings are simply supported on an inner rectangular core and external walls parallel to the sides of the c ore. Such floors are unsupported by intermediate columns and present re-entrant corners. The stresses at the corners of such plates are theoretically infinite, but become finite in the immediate neighborhood of the corner. Thus practical design stresses can be obtained by substituting for the actual plate a circular sector simply supported on its circular boundary and built-in on its straight sides. Such stresses are derived for the case of a circular se c tor with a right angle cutout and are good approximations of the stresses in the actual corner of the floor a distance from the corner of the order of two or three times the thickness of the plate.