Pinning/depinning of crack fronts in heterogeneous materials

Abstract

The fatigue fracture surfaces of a metallic alloy, and the stress corrosion fracture surfaces of glass are investigated as a function of crack velocity. It is shown that in both cases, there are two fracture regimes, which have a well defined self-affine signature. At high enough length scales, the universal roughness index 0.78 is recovered. At smaller length scales, the roughness exponent is close to 0.50. The crossover length ${\xi }_c$ separating these two regimes strongly depends on the material, and exhibits a power-law decrease with the measured crack velocity ${\xi }_c\propto v^{-\varphi }$, with $\varphi \simeq 1$. The exponents $\nu$ and $\beta$ characterising the dependence of ${\xi }_c$ and $v$ upon the pulling force are shown to be close to $\nu \simeq 2$ and $\beta \simeq 2$.

4 pages, latex, and 4 encapsulated postscript figures