A Unified Approach to Physically Based Weakest-Link Theories for Multiaxial Fracture of Ceramics

The paper discusses two physically based weakest-link approaches, commonly adopted to evaluate the reliability of ceramic components in multiaxial states of stress (namely, Evans' multiaxial elemental strength method and Batdorf's flaw density approach) whose equivalence has been recently proven. It is shown here how the two formulations can be simultaneously derived from the basic assumptions and simply regarded as two different ways to evaluate the same integral. Differences in computational efficiency yielded by the two different integration schemes are also illustrated.