The Peak Stress Method Applied to Bi-Material Corners

Bi-material interfaces are unavoidably present in many engineering applications, such as microelectronics, adhesive joints, fiber-reinforced composites and thermal barrier coatings. Under the hypothesis of linear elastic material behaviour, the local stress field at the point located at the free-edge of the bi-material interface has a singular behaviour, of which the intensity can be quantified by a generalized stress intensity factor, H. However, the numerical evaluation of H usually requires very accurate meshes and large computational efforts, hampering the use of H-based criteria in the engineering practice. The main aim of the present work is to overcome this limitation by extending to isotropic bi-material corners the Peak Stress Method (PSM), first proposed by Meneghetti and co-workers to estimate the stress intensity factor at the tip of a geometrical singular point with relatively coarse mesh patterns.