• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.1356-1362
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• 1996

Fracture toughness of heterogeneous brittle materials such as poly crystalline ceramics used to present the size (thickness) effect as well as statistically distributed results. There is belief that both(size effect and scatter) must be associated with each other. However, no generally accepted theory has been established so far. Using statistical approach, a probabilistic modeling for the fracture toughness which describes the thickness effect was attempted in this paper, Weibull distribution of specific fracture energy(SFE)at local areas and Griffith criterion are applied to the model. In addition, the newly developed model was verified with experimental results of alumina.