by Marchal, Yves; Walhin, Jean-François; Delannay, Francis

The precision of the measurement of the essential work of fracture requires an accurate determination of the critical ligament length below which the ligament is in a mixed mode stress state and the failure mechanisms considerably change. A statistical procedure is proposed which allows to determine easily and accurately this critical ligament length. After rejection of the specimens having too small ligament lengths, w_e is obtained by extrapolation of the remaining data for zero ligament length. The number of data points from which w_e is calculated is also shown to strongly influence the precision of the measurement. The procedure is applied to the measurement of the toughness of sheets of Al and Zn alloys and of a low density polyethylene.

DOI: 10.1023/A:1007482121146
Print publication date: 9/1/1997
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