A New Criterion for Crack Formation in Disordered Materials

Abstract

Crack formation is conventionally described as a nucleation phenomenon despite the fact that the temperatures necessary to overcome the nucleation barrier are far too high. In this paper we consider the possibility that cracks are created due to the presence of frozen disorder (e.g. heterogeneities or frozen dislocations). In particular we calculate the probability for the occurrence of a critical crack in a quasi two-dimensional disordered elastic system. It turns out that this probability takes the form of an Arrhenius law (as for thermal nucleation) but with the temperature T replaced by an effective disorder temperature T_eff which depends on the strength of the disorder. The extension of these results to d=3 dimensions is briefly discussed.

accepted for publication in Phys.Rev. B

References in corpus (2)

• Onset of Propagation of Planar Cracks in Heterogeneous Media
• Crack propagation in quasicrystals

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• Super-Arrhenius dynamics for sub-critical crack growth in disordered brittle media
• Nucleation of interfacial shear cracks in thin films on disordered substrates
• Theory and Experiments for Disordered Elastic Manifolds, Depinning, Avalanches, and Sandpiles