Thermoelastic determination of crack-tip coordinates in composites

Many experimental methods for determining stress intensity factors involve knowing the position of the crack-tip. Using measured coordinates of the crack-tip before testing can be insufficiently reliable. On the other hand, results herein show that assuming the maximum measured signal occurs at the crack-tip can be erroneous. The present study develops and demonstrates a least-squares method to evaluate the crack-tip coordinates of composites accurately and systematically from measured temperature information.