Issue 33

V. Veselý et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 33 (2015) 120-133; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.33.16 121 among others, within methods for evaluation of fracture parameters and subsequently the mechanical characterization of these materials. Due to this effect (connected also with geometry and boundary effect), investigation the role of FPZ in the fracture of quasi-brittle materials, particularly concrete, has attracted lot of interest from engineering community in the field of concrete fracture mechanics. For the FPZ extent estimation, a precise description of the stress state in the cracked body is necessary. For that purpose, multi-parameter fracture mechanics is employed as the proportion of sizes of the FPZ and the whole specimen is much larger in the case of the quasi-brittle materials than e.g. plastic zone in metals [4], and therefore the stress field farther from the crack trip must be described precisely. Main focus of the contribution is on testing of two own developed automatic utilities; the first enables computation of values of coefficients of the higher order terms of Williams power series using the over-deterministic method (ODM) applied to results of FEM analysis, the second provides analytical approximation of the stress field in the cracked body via truncated Williams power expansion taking into account the values of coefficients of the higher order terms calculated using the first programmed application. From this point of view the latter utility provides a kind of backward reconstruction of the stress field analysed by FEM and processed via ODM. The influence of the number of terms considered for the power series reconstruction of stress field as well as the way of selection of the FEM nodes for the calculation of the values of coefficients of those terms are investigated in the paper. Verification of the overall analysis results is conducted on an example of the wedge splitting test specimen as it has become very frequently used in the field of testing of silicate-based composites (let us name e.g. [5-7] from recent period). M ULTI - PARAMETER FRACTURE MECHANICS CONCEPT Near-crack tip fields for mode I fracture problem he stress and displacement fields in a two-dimensional homogeneous elastic isotropic body with a crack loaded by an arbitrary remote loading can be expressed in a form of an infinite power series, the Williams expansion [8]. For the stress tensor  and displacement vector u it holds:     1 2 , 1 , , , , 2 n ij n ij n nA r f n i j x y          (1) and     2 , 1 , , , , , n i n i u n u r A f n E i x y        (2) respectively, where r and θ are polar coordinates (with their beginning placed at the crack tip and the crack propagation direction corresponds with the x -axis), f ij ,  and f i , u are known functions, E and  represent Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio. Values of coefficients A n depend on the cracked specimen geometry (crack length, specimen shape and boundary conditions) and they are usually determined numerically at present. Typically, coefficients A n are expressed as functions of the relative crack length  and transformed (normalized with respect to loading and appropriate power of the specimen’s dimension) into the form of dimensionless functions [9, 10] as follows     2 2 2 2 nom nom 4 ( ) for 1, 3, 4 , and ( ) n n n A A g W n N g t             (3) where  nom is the nominal stress in the central plane of the specimen due to the applied load, W and B is the specimen’s width and breadth, respectively. The nominal stress is usually considered as being caused only by the splitting component P sp of the load imposed to the specimen via the wedge (see Fig. 1a, i.e.  nom = P sp / BW ), although it has been shown by the authors [11] that also the vertical component P v plays a significant role in many cases. Note that the approximations of the individual stress tensor components presented further in this paper are expressed using truncated forms of the Williams series. Over-deterministic method Computation of the values of the A n coefficients of terms of the Williams expansion is conducted using the technique solving the system of equations resulting from the displacement field expression in Eq. (2) referred to as the Over- T