Development of fracture process zone in quasi-brittle bodies during failure

Abstract eng:
The paper introduces a methodology for an estimation of the size and shape of a fracture process zone evolving at the macroscopic crack tip in quasibrittle materials during their tensile failure. The procedure is based on a general description of the stress field in cracked bodies done by Williams’ power series in combination with the philosophy and selected features of classical non-linear fracture models for concrete, i.e. the equivalent elastic crack models and the cohesive crack models. The proposed procedure incorporated in existing methods for the fracture parameters determination is supposed to eliminate or substantially decrease the effect of the test specimen size and geometry (the effect of the specimen’s free boundaries) on the determined values of fracture characteristics of quasi-brittle materials, from which the existing methods considerably suffer. The estimation of the fracture process zone development during the fracture is illustrated on numerically simulated fracture tests on three-point bending of notched beams.

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