Most often, the engineering components under service loads develop a crack in arbitrary orientation, which may result in fracture under mixed mode conditions. In this study, a recently proposed single edge cracked circular (SECC) specimen is used for performing mixed mode (I/II) fracture studies of polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA). The SECC specimens fabricated from the PMMA sheet have been used to conduct fracture experiments under static loading. A large number of finite element (FE) numerical analyses of the SECC specimen have been performed to determine the stress intensity factors and T-stress for different mixed mode configurations. The critical fracture load and crack kink angles have been measured from fractured specimens and are compared with the generalized maximum tangential stress (GMTS) criterion. The experimental results are in good agreement with the GMTS criterion. The results show that the newly proposed SECC specimen can successfully be utilized to study the mixed mode fracture behavior of brittle materials like PMMA.

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