Anand & Gurtin (2002) have recently developed a continuum theory for the elasticviscoplastic deformation of amorphous solids. Their theory is motivated by and builds on the work of Parks, Argon, Boyce, Arruda, and their co-workers (e.g. Boyce et al., 1988; Arruda & Boyce, 1993) on modeling the plastic deformation of amorphous polymers. The theory of Anand & Gurtin (2002) carefully accounts for ...

‘Curving’ could occur in Mode I brittle fracture and it can be attributed to the constraint. The variation of the apparent fracture toughness with constraint with or without crack curving is investigated. Using a critical opening or hoop stress as the fracture criterion, it is demonstrated that a fracture event can be quantified by two mechanics parameters, i.e. K and A3 for fracture without cu...

Nanomechanical characteristics of standalone silver nanowires (Ag NWs) are a key issue for providing a failure criterion of advanced flexible electrodes that are trending towards smaller radius of curvatures (ROCs). Through in-situ tensile and buckling tests of pentagonal Ag NWs, we demonstrated that the intrinsic fracture strain provides a significant criterion to predict the mechanical and el...

Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in which a network of elastic beams, bonds or electrical fuses with random failure thresholds are subject to an increasing external load. These models describe ...

Dynamic crack microbranching processes in brittle materials are investigated by means of a computational fracture mechanics approach using the finite element method with special interface elements and a topological data structure representation. Experiments indicate presence of a limiting crack speed for dynamic crack in brittle materials as well as increasing fracture resistance with crack spe...

Low-velocity plate impact experiments using a single-stage gas-gun are performed on Zr58.5Cu15.6Ni12.8Al10.3Nb2.8. Compressive fracture surfaces of the samples subjected to varying impact velocities and stress amplitudes are evaluated in order to study their loading rate dependence. Samples impacted at increasing loading rates, from increasing velocities of impact, show a larger extent of local...

High-carbon structural steel wires were prestressed to various levels in a plasma hydrogenation environment and then pulled slow strain rate test (SSRT). The effect of under different prestressing on the material's tensile response hydrogen embrittlement was noted. It found that ultimate strength (UTS), yield strength, ductility wire samples are decreased by levels. more drastic decrease UTS, i...

Numerical studies of the ductile-brittle transition are described that are based on incorporating physically based models of the competing fracture mechanisms into the material's constitutive relation. An elastic-viscoplastic constitutive relation for a porous plastic solid is used to model ductile fracture by the nucleation and subsequent growth of voids to coalescence. Cleavage is modeled in ...