Fracture study in notched ductile polymeric plates subjected to mixed mode I/II loading: Application of equivalent material concept

Fracture of a ductile polymeric material containing U-notches is studied both experimentally and theoretically under mixed mode I/II loading conditions. Rectangular plates containing a central bean-shaped slit with two U-shaped ends are utilized for conducting fracture tests. Specimens with different notch inclination angles and various notch tip radii are loaded under remote tension to measure their load-carrying capacities (LCCs) experimentally. The Equivalent Material Concept (EMC) is reformulated to be utilized for theoretically predicting the obtained experimental results. For this purpose, the maximum tangential stress (MTS) and the mean stress (MS) criteria are combined with EMC. As the main novelty of this research, it is revealed that both the EMC-MTS and EMC-MS criteria, which have been more recently used for studying only pure mode I fracture behavior of U-notched epoxy resin, can provide very good predictions to the experimental results obtained under mixed mode I/II loading conditions.