Fracture behaviour of engineering stone material

Abstract

Purpose Engineered stone is a material which can be described as an artificial stone. The exemplary application area is sink production. There are very few research projects about this type of material. In fact, most of them are research conducted by the manufacturing company, which are limited to the basic properties of the material. However, knowledge about fracture mechanic of this material may be crucial in terms of usage. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach Analysis of the inside structure was made using an optical microscope as well as SEM. In the paper, methods which can be used to obtain data about fracture behaviour of material are presented. Using eXtended Finite Element Method and experimental data from three-point bending of notched specimens stress intensity factors (SIFs) for I and II load modes were obtained. Finally, a comparison between the fracture initiation angle in the function of the ration of SIFs for I/II load modes and maximum tangential stress hypothesis prediction was presented. Findings Analysis of the inside structure proves that this type of material has an uneven distribution of particle size. This can follow to void and micronotches formation and, later, to the failure of the material. A method of obtaining stress intensity factors for the discussed type of material and specimens can be successfully applied to other similar material, as proposed in this work. Standard crack angle propagation criteria are not sufficient for this type of material. Originality/value There are very few research papers about this type of material. The subject of fracture mechanic is not properly discovered, despite the fact that IT is important in terms of the application area of these materials.

Guest editorial

“…The selected articles of the present special issue were subjected to a rigorous peer review process according to the high scientific standards of the International Journal of Structural Integrity . This special issue is composed by a total of 10 papers proposed by engineers and scientists, covering subjects related to the aforementioned topics, such as fatigue analysis of metallic elements (Santos et al , 2020; Viana et al , 2020), fracture mechanics (Smolnicki et al , 2020), steels structures and connections (Jovasevic et al , 2020), optimization algorithms applied to metallic elements (Li et al , 2020) and among others (Liu et al , 2020; Mech, 2020; Xie et al , 2020a, b; Cao et al , 2020; Kebir et al , 2020).…”

Guest editorial

“…This Special Issue represents the second part of a set of contributions in the field of structural integrity and failure analysis of metallic materials and structures. In the first part of the Special Issue (Montenegro et al , 2021), a range of research topics related to fatigue analysis of metallic elements (Santos et al , 2020; Viana et al , 2020), fracture mechanics (Smolnicki et al , 2020), steels structures and connections (Jovasevic et al , 2020), optimization algorithms applied to metallic elements (Li et al , 2020), among others (Liu et al , 2020; Mech, 2020; Xie et al ., 2020a, b; Cao et al , 2020; Kebir et al , 2020) were covered and published. Several authors have focused on the topic of structural integrity and failure analysis of metallic structural elements.…”