Further Studies on Dynamic Crack Branching

摘要

Crack branching represents one extreme of the large range of dynamic crack propagation behaviors and has been the subject of numerous theoretical and experimental investigations, several of which can be found. Recently, the authors derived a crack curving and a branching criteria based on the directional stability of a propagating crack. The crack curving criteria is a micro-mechanical model of continuous micro-flaw growth and coalescence in the vicinity of the moving crack tip. It assumes that the crack is momentarily kined or bifurcated, when an off-axis micro-flaw connects with the crack tip and is the dynamic extension of the crack curving criterion proposed by Streit and Finnie.