ABSTRACT
Details concerning the limitations of this kind of predictions, as well as the justification of those inaccurate predictions shown in Figure 3, may be consulted in Cicero et al. (2012a).
3 PREDICTIONS OF APPARENT FRACTURE TOUGHNESS
TheTCDs, in its different versions, allows the apparent fracture toughness (KIN) of any material to be predicted in notched conditions, which is generally higher
than the fracture toughness observed in cracked conditions. For this propose, it is necessary to consider the stress distribution on the notch tip. One commonly used expression is that provided by Creager & Paris (1967), which combined with the PM gives:
In the case of the LM, the expression is even simpler:
The KIN predictions provided by the TCDs have been applied to a number of very distinct materials: polymer PMMA (Cicero et al. 2012a), aluminum alloy Al7075-T651 with two different orientations, TL and LT (Madrazo et al. 2012), and two structural steels, S275JR and S355J2 at −50◦C and −150◦C respectively (Cicero et al. 2013). As an example, Figure 2 shows the predictions in PMMA.
