Understanding fast macroscale fracture from microcrack post mortem patterns

作者：Guerra Claudia; Scheibert Julien^*; Bonamy Daniel; Dalmas Davy

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012, 109(2): 390-394.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.1113205109

• dynamic fracture
• crack speed
• polymeric glass
• fracture energy
• fracture process

Dynamic crack propagation drives catastrophic solid failures. In many amorphous brittle materials, sufficiently fast crack growth involves small-scale, high-frequency microcracking damage localized near the crack tip. The ultrafast dynamics of microcrack nucleation, growth, and coalescence is inaccessible experimentally and fast crack propagation was therefore studied only as a macroscale average. Here, we overcome this limitation in polymethylmethacrylate, the archetype of brittle amorphous materials: We reconstruct the complete spatiotemporal microcracking dynamics, with micrometer/nanosecond resolution, through post mortem analysis of the fracture surfaces. We find that all individual microcracks propagate at the same low, load-independent velocity. Collectively, the main effect of microcracks is not to slow down fracture by increasing the energy required for crack propagation, as commonly believed, but on the contrary to boost the macroscale velocity through an acceleration factor selected on geometric grounds. Our results emphasize the key role of damage-related internal variables in the selection of macroscale fracture dynamics.

• 出版日期2012-1-10
• 单位中国地震局