Determination of the bridging law for mode I delamination via elastic restraint beam model and equivalent crack method

This article presented a simple procedure to determine the Mode I bridging law for both unidirectional and multidirectional composite laminates. It was based on an ‘Elastic Restrained Beam Model’ which assumed that the boundary conditions at the end of the cracked arms of the double cantilever beam (DCB) are elastically restrained by torsion springs. In this way, the closed-form solution of the DCB has been derived, without the need for a...