Fracture assessment of notched short glass fibre reinforced polyamide 6: An approach from failure assessment diagrams and the theory of critical distances

This paper provides a structural integrity assessment methodology for the analysis of notched short glass fibre reinforced polyamide 6 (SGFR-PA6). The proposal combines the use of Failure Assessment Diagrams for the fracture assessment and the application of the Theory of Critical Distances for the estimation of the apparent fracture toughness. The assumption that notches behave as cracks may be over conservative, so that the proposal here is to convert the notched situation into an equivalent cracked situation in which the material develops a higher fracture resistance. The methodology has been applied to 125 fracture specimens, combining five different fibre contents and five different notch radii. The results obtained validate the proposed assessment methodology, with a clear reduction of the conservatism obtained when the notch effect is not considered.