Coalescence of microcracks in brittle materials

摘要

The fracture process of brittle materials with randomly oriented microcracks criticallyrndepends on the strong interaction among microcracks and the coalescence pathrnleading to a fatal crack. In this paper, a model based on the coalescence process forrnplanar orientated microcracks is presented. A energy ratio is defined between the totalrnwork dissipation and the new crack surface energy in one coalescence step, which is arntoken of microcrack propagation driving force in the energetic sense. The ratio isrnplotted against different configuration parameters for collinear and wavy microcrackrnarrays. Different microcrack coalescing modes are discussed, along with an estimaternfor the probability of microcrack coalescence dominated by the first linkage.