Thermally induced quasi-static wavy crack propagation in a brittle solid

摘要

Morphological aspects of thermally induced brittle cracks are revisited. The formation of a growth pattern of cracks, which are subjected to the thermal loading due to the penetration of surface cooling, has formerly been studied for a system of parallel interacting straight cracks. In the present paper, attention is focused on the transition form straight to wavy crack propagation. The incremental extension of a curved crack is predicted by using the local symmetry criterion, where the step-by-step stress analyses are carried out by the finite-element method with the aid of an automatic mesh generation which is based n the paving method. Varieties of numerical results are obtained so that the influencing factor which may control the wavy crack paths is identified. Discussions are also made by comparing the numerical results with experimental observation.