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Scaling of Fatigue Crack Growth in Pristine Epoxy
Abstract
This work proposes an investigation on the scaling of fatigue crack growth in pristine epoxy. Towards this end, fatigue fracture tests on geometrically scaled Single Edge Notch Bending (SENB) specimens were conducted. It is shown that Paris-Erdogan law exhibits strong size effect on both slope and threshold for pure epoxy. This indicates that the fatigue Fracture Process Zone (FPZ) size is significantly larger compared to the quasi-static one. In fact, fracture tests conducted by Mefford et al. [1] and a comprehensive literature study [2] showed that the FPZ has a negligible effect on the scaling of the fracturing behavior of pure epoxy under quasi-static loading condition. By introducing a fatigue size effect model based on the energetic-equivalence framework, the thresholds in the Paris-Erdogan curves representing geomaticallyscaled specimens can be successfully adjusted whereas the slopes still exhibit size effect. This latter aspect needs to be studied further to enable the application of the Paris-Erdogan law to quasi-brittle structures of different sizes and geometries.
DOI
10.12783/asc33/25967
10.12783/asc33/25967
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