Abstract
Predicting fracture toughness of heterogeneous composites is an important and challenging problem in physics and mechanics. The dependence of effective toughness on elastic properties of phases remains unclear. Considering that energy plays an essential role in crack propagation, an energy approach is proposed to obtain effective toughness in this study. We built the relationship between effective toughness and the homogenized local surface energy. The energy is constructed by generalizing Eshelby’s equivalent inclusion formulation to heterogeneous case, which couples physical features with elastic properties. An analytical formula of effective toughness can be derived for heterogeneous composites. Based on this formula, effects of toughness and elastic properties of the phases are discussed in depth, which reveals that how elastic heterogeneity can influence the effective toughness fundamentally. It is demonstrated that the predictions of concretes and metal toughening glasses agree well with experimental evidences.
Published Version
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