The cohesive crack concept: application to PMMA at −60 °C

This paper provides a large number of experimental results from the fracture of round-notched samples of a material that remains essentially in the linear elastic regime up to crack initiation. Loading of the samples ranged from pure tensile up to bending. Notch acuity was changed by changing the notch tip radii, notch angle and notch depth. All these experimental results have been used to analyze the predictive capability of the cohesive crack model. All tests were numerically simulated and several criteria justifying the adopted softening function are discussed. The agreement between numerical prediction and experimental results was very good.