Two measurement techniques for determining effective stress intensity factors

Two methods were studied for determining crack closure and locking effects under combinations of mixed mode I and II loading, namely the strain gauge and the surface replica methods. They demonstrated that strain gauges are able to detect the mode I crack closure but not mode II crack locking. As an alternative, the surface replica method is suggested as a practical technique for measuring mode II crack locking effects. The effective mode II stress intensity factor range can be estimated by comparison of the actual measured sliding range between a pair of crack faces and the theoretical sliding range.