Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol.98, No.12, 3690-3698, 2015
Characterizing Brittle Fracture by Modeling Crack Deflection Angles from the Microstructure
This study introduces a simple analytical model for fracture toughness to bridge the length scales from grain size to bulk thickness by assembling a virtual crack path from the angles recorded on an unfractured microstructure, which is a great challenge in fracture mechanics due to the high geometrical complexity. Good agreement is found between a crack deflection angle distribution measured from 5764 crack segments and the prediction by the model and the possible influence of residual stress is quasi quantitatively discussed. A total of 7.4% of the crack segments observed acted as crack bridges, while 7.3% was predicted by the model. A quantification of how high an angle needs to be to turn crack deflection into crack bridging is given. The ratio of fracture toughness from grain boundary to grain, G(1c(gb))/G(1c(g)), was measured indirectly from all samples to be between 0.3 and 0.35.