Generalized Orowan‐Petch Plot for Brittle Fracture

The fracture of brittle solids is considered to be based on a defect configuration consisting of a stress concentrator, in our case a hemispherical pore, and a starter crack, in our case either a semicircular crack, a circular crack, or a circumferential crack. Computation of the stress field, application of the relevant weight functions, and an averaging scheme based on the assumption of a virtual crack increment provides stress intensity factors for all defect configurations considered. A normalization scheme yields a generalized version of the Orowan‐Petch plot in the form of a normalized strength to normalized defect size relationship.