Determination of Translaminar Notch Fracture Toughness for Laminated Composites Using Brazilian Disk Test

This paper evaluates the fracture of notched epoxy matrix composites using the Brazilian disk (BD) test from both numerical and experimental points of view. The study began with a comprehensive experimental program covering three different composite lay-ups (quasi-isotropic, unidirectional, and cross-ply) and various geometries of U and V notches. Specifically, the BD samples combined the three layouts, four different notch angles, and three notch radii with three specimens per combination, leading to an overall number of 108 fracture tests. The experiments showed the appropriateness of the BD test for the study of the fracture behavior of composite materials and provided a good pool of data for further investigations. Subsequently, the virtual isotropic material concept (VIMC) was applied in combination with two fracture criteria to theoretically predict the experimentally acquired fracture loads. This study demonstrated that using the VIMC approach can provide robust predictions while incurring much lower computational costs compared to the conventional approaches found in the literature.