Roughening of Fracture Surfaces: the Role of Plastic Deformations

Abstract

Post mortem analysis of fracture surfaces of ductile and brittle materials on the $\mu$m-mm and the nm scales respectively, reveal self affine graphs with an anomalous scaling exponent $\zeta \approx 0.8$. Attempts to use elasticity theory to explain this result failed, yielding exponent $\zeta \approx 0.5$ up to logarithms. We show that when the cracks propagate via plastic void formations in front of the tip, followed by void coalescence, the voids positions are positively correlated to yield exponents higher than 0.5.

4 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

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• Fracture surfaces of heterogeneous materials: a 2D solvable model
• Void Formation and Roughening in Slow Fracture
• Super-Arrhenius dynamics for sub-critical crack growth in disordered brittle media
• Statistical Physics of Fracture Surfaces Morphology
• Random and Correlated Roughening in Slow Fracture by Damage Nucleation
• Propagation Mechanism of Brittle Cracks
• Effect of Disorder and Notches on Crack Roughness
• Numerical study of the temperature and porosity effects on the fracture propagation in a 2D network of elastic bonds