Two distinct mechanisms of crack initiation and advance by void growth have been identified in the literature on the mechanics of ductile fracture. One is the interaction a single void with the crack tip characterizing initiation and the subsequent void by void advance of the tip. This mechanism is represented by the early model of Rice and Johnson and the subsequent more detailed numerical com...

We studied electromigration (EM) lifetimes and void growth at low cumulative failure probability. We carried out EM test in damascene Cu lines using sudden-death type test structures. Its cumulative failure probability ranges from 0.005 to 90%. To investigate the void growth behaviour, Cu microstructures was investigated. EM lifetime shows correlation with the void nucleation site and the void ...

This laboratory investigation has been conducted to elucidate how the fi nes fraction affects the undrained residual shear strength and liquefaction potential of sand-silt mixtures (Algeria). A series of monotonic and cyclic undrained triaxial tests were carried out on undrained, reconstituted, saturated samples of sand with varying fi nes content ranging from 0 to 50%. These were undertaken in...

We thank the authors of Ref. [1] for their comments and interest in our work [2–6]. We agree that the emission of shear loops on one single shear plane cannot lead to void growth. However, our simulations suggest that coordinated shear on non-parallel planes can lead to void growth/shrinkage [3–5]. Detailed descriptions of this process are still being worked out and represent an exciting area f...

Recently it was proposed that voids in crystals could grow by emission of shear dislocation loops [V.A. Lubarda, M.S. Scheider, D.H. Kalantar, B.A. Remington, M.A. Meyers, Acta Materialia 52 (2004) 1397–1408]. Even more recently, this proposal was ostensibly supported by molecular simulations of voids in strained single crystals [S. Traiviratana, E.M. Bringa, D.J. Benson, M.A. Meyers, Acta Mate...