An experimental study for the characterization of elastic brittle-fracture behavior of materials by means of continuous damage mechanics-aided approaches

In this study an attempt was made to introduce some novel operational techniques for the characterization of materials' fracture, assisted by certain approaches of continuum brittle damage mechanics. This was done by using certain variant operational parameters, i.e., initial damage, damage at failure, structural instability number, strain energy dissipation deficiency number, damage process intensity number and failure strain energy efficiency number. The ultimate scope is to characterize the influence of initial damage, on the above parameters. Tensile tests were carried out, taking into account the basic assumptions of continuum damage mechanics allowing analysis of brittle damage to be applied to elastic-brittle solids under low dynamic loading. A polymeric material, commercially known as Plexiglas, was selected, which fulfils satisfactorily, most of the desired theoretical assumptions.