Influence of stress singularities on scaling of fracture of metal-composite hybrid structures

It has been recently shown that the nominal structural strength of metal-composite structures depends on the structure size, and such dependence is strongly influenced by the stress singularities. Nevertheless, previous studies only focused on structures that exhibit very strong stress singularities, which are close to the crack-like stress singularity. In the actual engineering designs, due to the mismatch of material properties and complex structural geometries, many metal-composite structures may contain stress singularities that are much weaker than the crack-like stress singularity. This paper presents a numerical study on the size dependence of scaling of fracture of metal-composite hybrid structures for a wide range of stress singularities. The numerical examples include a series of metal-composite hybrid beams with a V-notch under three-point bending with different notch angles, which lead to various magnitudes of stress singularities. By assuming that the bimaterial interface is weaker than both metal and composite, we use a mixed-mode cohesive element model to simulate the fracture behavior of these hybrid beams. It is shown that the resulting size effect curves strongly depend on the magnitude of stress singularities. The simulation results agree well with a recently developed energetic-statistical scaling model.