Abstract
The fracture toughness of materials that exhibit limited yielding at the crack tip is often characterised by evaluation of the “far-field” J integral. However, Carlsson et al(7) have shown that such “far-field” parameters may be less than ideal for composite materials where the crack tip in the matrix material undergoes extensive yielding. This paper investigates this proposition and presents the results of a numerical evaluation into the use of a near-tip energy integral, the so called T* parameter, for evaluating the fracture toughness of composite materials. Here attention is focused on both the near-tip fracture parameter and on load history effects.
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