Brittle Fracture
AimsBefore you startIntroductionWhen do atomic bonds break?Why do cracks weaken a material?Inglis and the crack tip stress ideaCan we calculate the energy changes?What about tension?Another way of expressing the energiesAnother way of calculating the energiesWhy bother if they are the same?Coping with a scatter in strengthSimulation of Weibull modulus experimentWhen does the sample fail completely?Sub-critical crack growth and R-curvesSummaryQuestionsGoing furtherTLP creditsTLP contentsShow all contentViewing and downloading resourcesAbout the TLPsTerms of useFeedbackCredits Print this page
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Why bother if they are the same?
K is useful because stress intensity factors, like stresses, are additive. Irwin showed that any loading state could be broken down into 3 different types of loading that he called modes, I, II and III:
To get the total K, we just sum the contribution from each of the three modes.
This is much more difficult to do with energies, where we would have to think about interaction terms.