Mohamed K. Hassan^{1, 2}, Mohammed Y. Abdellah^{3, 2,}, Ahmed F. Mohamed^{2, 4}, Tareq S. ElAbiadi¹, S. Azam², W.W. Marzouk¹

In last decades, hybrid composite materials play a competitive role in many industrial applications such as electrical and electronic industries. Copper/Glass-Reinforced Epoxy Laminate is a hybrid composite that is used in almost all electronic devices. Since these elements undergo different stress amplitudes under different working conditions, therefore the fracture toughness of such material is important to understand the failures occurred under different operating conditions. The present work aims to investigate the fracture behavior of these composites by experimentally measuring and predicting their fracture toughness and by numerically building the model. At the first stage, a center-notched tensile specimen is used to measure fracture toughness in mode I at room temperature; an average fracture toughness of with SDV is found. At the second stage, X-FEM is implemented to a simple numerical model to predict the fracture toughness of such a material and to measure stresses induced through the specimen during applied stress. The variation of both, predicted fracture toughness and cohesive stress at the crack face with crack opening displacement, shows that the finite element results are in good agreement with the experimental results.

fracture toughness, X-FEM, MEMS, laminate, center edge notch