Influence of Friction on the Stress Field of the Brazilian Tensile Test

The friction stresses developed between the specimen and the loading platens in the Brazilian tensile test are usually neglected in most of the theoretical analyses of the stress eld developed in the disc. Indeed, starting with Hondros (1959), who rst proposed an analytic solution for the stress eld, the disc is considered to be loaded by either a uniform radial pressure along two symmetric arcs of its periphery or by a pair of concentrated radial forces (Atkinson et al. 1982). However, recent studies (Lavrov and Vervoort 2002; Lanaro et al. 2009) indicate that the inuence of friction is not in general negligible, since this drastically changes the stress eld at least in the immediate vicinity of the loading platendisc interface.