The concept of “fatigue” arose several times in the Module on Fracture (Module 23), as in the growth of cracks in the Comet aircraft that led to disaster when they became large enough to propagate catastrophically as predicted by the Griffith criterion. Fatigue, as understood by materials technologists, is a process in which damage accumulates due to the repetitive application of loads that may...

The strength and fatigue behavior of bulk fused silica is well understood in terms of the growth of microcracks under the combined influence of stress and environmental attack. The behavior of high strength, flaw free silica optical fiber shows significant differences from the bulk material for poorly understood reasons making long term predictions unreliable. It is known that silica fiber stre...

Continuum mechanics predicts that the propagation speed of non-equilibrium information in solids is limited by the longitudinal wave speed, so is crack propagation. However, solids are essentially discrete systems. In this paper, via theoretical analysis and numerical simulations, it is demonstrated in a straightforward way that nonequilibrium disturbance (e.g. force, displacement, energy, and ...

We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding at some critical stress which is nothing but the Griffith threshold for crack propagation. An inhomogeneous mode of sliding occurs when the driving velocity ...