Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 February 2011
It is frequently reported that the higher the strength of cement based materials, the more brittle is their behavior. It could he useful to quantitatively express the degree of brittleness. Many attempts [1–13] have been made to use linear elastic fracture mechanis (LEFM) to quantitatively express the degree of brittleness. For example, by testing notched beams one can calculate, using the formulas developed from LEFM, a quantity called fracture toughness and termed KIC from the measured maximum load and the initial notch-length. Unfortunalely, it has been observed that K thus calculated is dependent on the dimension of the beams. Many researchers have attempted to analyze this size dependency. Such approaches are usually quite cumbersome and are often based on expensive nonlinear finite element programs. In this paper a direct method is suggested to calculate two size-independent fracture toughness parameters from the experimental results. The method was developed based on tests on notched-beams of different mix proportions and different sizes.