An improved engineering approach to assess crack arrays: an Addendum to Arch. Appl. Mech. 84 (2014) 1325–1337

Crack arrays with specific patterns can be found nearly everywhere in nature and play also an important role in structural mechanics. Instead of employing a complicated and advanced numerical investigation, it is useful and often sufficient to estimate energy-release rates and stress-intensity factors of such configurations by simple, engineering-based formulae. To this extend, we improve a previously derived formula with the help of elementary beam theory by accompanying numerical calculations.