A 3D Cohesive Investigation on Branching for Brittle Materials

Abstract

Recently, Fineberg and Sharon conducted dynamic crack propagation experiments in PMMA and soda lime glass [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. They pointed out some notable features of micro-branching instabilities in brittle materials, and their experiments raised a considerable interest for the brittle fracture dynamics. In this paper we present some numerical results on brittle fracture obtained by using cohesive theories of fracture. In the numerical calculations, the branching instability is a natural outcome of the explicit formulation. The cohesive model captures the basic features of experiments, such as the transition of the crack surface from smooth to hackled with increasing energy flux, and the power-law functional form of the profile of the crack branches.

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