• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.87-95
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• 1989

The fatigue crack propagation of random short fiber SMC composite material was investigated. In macroscopic viewpoint, SMC composite material was treated as isotropic material and was analyzed in terms of conventional fracture mechanics. Experiments were conducted on mode I and mixed respectively and various loading level was applied to each mode. Fatigue crack growth can be explained in three steps and most of fatigue life is consumed in initial crack growth. In this experiments, power law, i.e, da/dN=C(C.DELTA.K)$^{m}$ , between fatigue crack growth rate and stress intensity factor range, was valid and the value of the exponent m is about 10, which is much higher than that of other metals. Fracture mechanism was also investigated by SEM fractographic study.