* Corresponding author; Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT Crack tunneling is a crack growth feature often seen in stable tearing crack growth tests on specimens made of ductile materials and containing through-thickness cracks with initially straight crack fronts. As a specimen is loaded monotonically, the mid-section of the crack front will advance first, which will be followed by crack growth ...

Theories of toughness of materials depend on an understanding of the characteristic instabilities of the crack tip, and their possible interactions. In this paper we examine the effect of dislocation emission on subsequent cleavage of a crack and on further dislocation emission. The work is an extension of the previously published Lattice Greens Function methodology[1, 2, 3]. We have developed ...

In the short crack regime of the fatigue process, grain boundaries in steels are barriers against crack growth. In this paper, we use: (1) a method involving crack density; and (2) a method of dimensional analysis, to evaluate the effects of grain size and grain-boundary resistance on short crack behaviour and fatigue life. The results show that the fatigue life increases with a decrease in gra...

The rigorous derivation of lower dimensional models for thin structures is a question of great interest in mechanics and its applications. In the early 90’s a rigorous approach to dimension reduction has emerged in the stationary framework and in the context of nonlinear elasticity. This approach is based on Γ-convergence and, starting from the seminal paper [3, 4], has led to establish a hiera...

nowadays, textile and woven fabric composites are taken into consideration forapplications in high mechanical properties and every in-plane direction. however, developments inmodelling and characterisation of the fabric reinforced composite materials are considered more inthe effects of element types used in the mesh generation of the crack tip. the type of elementselected for the crack tip, a ...

Fatigue crack growth has been observed recently in ferroelectrics under cyclic electric loading[ Does the crack grow by electric breakdown\ or by the stress _eld near the crack tip< The present paper provides a mechanistic explanation for the electric!_eld!induced fatigue crack growth[ The non!uniform electric _eld near an insulated crack tip might cause domain switching which in turn produces ...

We present a combined novel methodology to study the three-dimensional complex geometry of a tortuous crack and identify the essential features of the crack and its propagation inside a heterogeneous material. We find that some severe damage events occur unexpectedly below a local mode-I crack within the sample; we realize that the severe plastic zone of the local mode-I crack is shifted down b...

This paper investigates the phenomenon of slant fracture observed in stable tearing tests of many ductile materials, where an initially flat crack, loaded under remote Mode I conditions, tends to grow into a slant crack and stay in the slant configuration until final fracture. In an effort to identify potential reasons why cracks prefer to grow in a slant manner, three-dimensional finite elemen...

initial cracks occur in high strength concrete sleepers for various reasons, such as shrinkage and wrong curing and long lifetime of over 50 years of sleepers. these cracks may lead to complete failure of the structure. in order to more accurately design the sleepers, fracture mechanics (not strength of materials) should be incorporated. in order to achieve this purpose, it is important to fore...