Effective Fracture Toughness of Microcracked Materials

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Explicit analytical formulas are derived for the stress intensity factors at the tips of a main crack and of a microcrack for the two‐dimensional case of a collinear microcrack. This configuration is used to derive an estimate of the toughness degradation due to microcracks linking up with an advancing main crack. The implications of this estimate for theoretical predictions of the toughening due to stress‐induced micro‐cracking are discussed.