Experimental investigations on the cracking and mechanical responses of PMMA samples with two 3D embedded elliptic flaws under uniaxial compression

In this paper, the cracking and mechanical responses are studied for the Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) sample with two three-dimensional embedded coplanar elliptic flaws subjected to uniaxial compression. The experimental results indicate that both the peak stress and crack initiation stress first decrease and then increase with increasing flaw angle, and they increase linearly with increasing flaw spacing. Moreover, five crack modes occur in these tested samples, including the coplanar secondary cracks, wing cracks, petal cracks, anti-wing cracks, and vertical giant cracks. The growth length of wing cracks is approximately equal to the length of the long axis of pre-existing flaw. However, the maximum width is roughly equal to half the length of the long axis of pre-existing elliptic flaw. The final failure modes include the splitting failure induced by wing cracks and vertical giant cracks, and the mixed tensile-shear failure induced by coplanar secondary cracks and wing cracks.