Fatigue crack growth in nano-composites

This paper discusses the potential of a variant of the Hartman-Schijve equation to represent fatigue crack growth in a range of nano-composites. It is found that when expressed in this form the exponent of this variant is approximately 2 and, as such, is considerably lower than the exponent in Paris like power law representations for delamination growth in composites. As such we see that, in these examples, the present variant of the Hartman-Schijve representation of delamination growth in nano-composites is similar to that seen for crack growth in metals, delamination growth in composites and the environmental degradation of adhesive bonds. This suggests that the present formulation may be useful for the damage tolerant assessment of small naturally occurring defects in nano-composite structures and for the ranking of nano-composites. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.