Verification of Brittle Fracture Criteria for Bimaterial Structures

The increasing application of composite materials in the construction of machines causes strong need for modelling and evaluating their strength. There are many well known hypotheses used for homogeneous materials subjected to monotone and cyclic loading conditions, which have been verified experimentally by various authors. These hypotheses should be verified also for composite materials. This paper provides experimental and theoretical results of such verifications for bimaterial structures with interfacial cracks. Three well known fracture hypotheses of: Griffith, McClintock and Novozhilov were chosen. The theoretical critical load values arising from each hypotheses were compared with the experimental data including uni and multi-axial loading conditions. All tests were carried out with using specially prepared specimens of steel and PMMA.