Micro-crack toughening in particulate composites

✍ Scribed by Anil Misra; A. A. Sukere

• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 357 KB
• Volume: 52
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1573-2673
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00034908

✦ Synopsis

Presence of micro-cracks in the neighborhood of the tip of macro-cracks in brittle materials can influence the fracture process. In particulate composites micro-cracks can develop as a result of manufacturing process or service loading . These micro-cracks significantly alter the stress and the strain fields at the main crack tip . Depending on the location and orientation of the micro-crack this can result in stress amplification ('anti-shielding') or a decrease in stress ('shielding', 'toughening') at the main crack tip . In order to study the fracture process in such composites it is important to carefully characterize micro-crack main crack tip interactions . Along this line, fracture toughening due to micro-cracks in isotropic elastic materials has been investigated by several researchers [1][2][3][4] . In this paper, we use a discrete modelling scheme to investigate the interactions of discrete micro-cracks with the main crack in a heterogeneous particulate composite .