“…It is well known that despite the carbide phase is under compressive RTS on average, the actual local stress can vary in a rather wide range and even become tensile on some small fraction of instances of the carbide crystals in cemented carbides (Coats & Krawitz, 2003;Krawitz, Crapenhoft, Reichel, & Warren, 1988;Krawitz, Reichel, & Hitterman, 1989;Weisbrook & Krawitz, 1996). The RTS is added to the tensile and shear stress field of the crack (Cutler & Virkar, 1985;Rice, 1983) that creates a combined stress field of the crack and RTS and, by these means, affects the location of the weakest carbide region.…”