Analysis on cohesive crack opening displacement considering the strain softening effect

In order to investigate the crack propagation in quasi-brittle materials like rock, ceramic and concrete, Hillerborg and his co-researchers abstracted the fracture process zone in front of a stress free crack in terms of a “fictitious crack zone”. On the fictitious crack zone, cohesive stresses distribute following a given softening relationship of stress vs. crack opening. Based on the polynomial or power series expression of cohesive crack opening displacement, the relationship of the cohesive stress vs. the crack opening displacement is established using elastic theory and integral equation, and some unknown physics variables are obtained using variation approach. The calculation results gained in this paper are close to the experimentally test ones.