Stress concentration and size effect in fracture of notched heterogeneous material

We study theoretically and experimentally the effect of long-range correlations in the material microstructure on the stress concentration in the vicinity of the notch tip. We find that while in a fractal continuum the notch-tip displacements obey the classic asymptotic for a linear elastic continuum, the power-law decay of notch-tip stresses is controlled by the long-range density correlations. The corresponding notch-size effect on fracture strength is in good agreement with the experimental tests performed on notched sheets of different kinds of paper. In particular, we find that there is no stress concentration if the fractal dimension of the fiber network is D <= d - 0.5, where d is the topological dimension of the paper sheet.