A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We investigate facet propagation and coarsening using in situ microscopy observations of fracture surfaces at different stages of quasistatic mixed-mode crack propagatio...

A B S TR AC T This paper presents an incremental elastic-plastic finite element solution to the problem of small scale yieldmg near a crack in plane strain for a non-hardening material. Emphasis is placed on the design of finite elements which allow accurate reproduction, m a numerical solution, of the detailed structure of the near crack tip stress and strain fields, as understood from previou...

Mechanisms for fatigue crack closure under plane strain conditions have recently been identified at very low (near-threshold) stress intensities in terms of effects of excess corrosion deposits or fracture surface roughness in promoting premature closure of the crack. In the present paper, a geometric model is presented for crack closure induced by fracture surface roughness. This model specifi...

We present a detailed account of an atomistic study of three-dimensional lattice trapping barriers to brittle fracture in Si. By means of a prototypical interatomic potential model, we map out the molecular details of the evolution of atomically sharp cracks in the (111) cleavage plane with straight crack fronts along the 1⁄21 10 and 1⁄211 2 directions, respectively. The thermally activated pro...

*Correspondence: Alex Hansen, Department of Physics, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Høyskoleringen 5, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway e-mail: [email protected] We investigate numerically the dynamics of crack propagation along a weak plane using a model consisting of fibers connecting a soft and a hard clamp. This bottom-up model has previously been shown to contain the comp...

Total-energy pseudopotential calculations are used to study the cleavage anisotropy in silicon. It is shown that cracks propagate easily on 111 and 110 planes provided crack propagation proceeds in the <1;10> direction. In contrast, if the crack is driven in a <001> direction on a 110 plane the bond breaking process is discontinuous and associated with pronounced relaxations of the surrounding ...

We study experimentally the propagation of an in-plane fracture into a transparent and heterogeneous Plexiglas block. A stable crack propagation in mode I is monitored by an imposed displacement. The experimental setup allows a high resolution observation of the crack front in situ. Self-affine properties of the crack front are described over more than three decades using several techniques: va...

We discuss apparent characteristic features of Rayleigh scattering of elastic waves from cracks. Interpreting these features, we propose a procedure that in some experimental situations may be useful to distinguish generally-shaped cracks from volume defects. For elliptically-shaped cracks, we propose additional procedures that in principle allow the unique specification of crack size, shape an...

A major contribution to the study of general anisotropic elasticity was made by Eshelby et al. (1953), who showed that, by making an appropriate linear transformation of the coordinate axes, the governing equations of the plane problem could be reduced to Laplacian form, thus permitting solutions to be written down in terms of analytic functions of the complex variable. This method was elaborat...

We present a model for the brittle–ductile transition in ferritic steels based on two dimensional discrete dislocation simulations of crack-tip plasticity. The sum of elastic fields of the crack and the emitted dislocations defines an elasto–plastic crack field. Effects of crack-tip blunting of the macrocrack are included in the simulations. The plastic zone characteristics are found to be in a...