Abstract
This paper presents the results of optical tracking of a crack tip in a fatigue test. The crack tip exhibits intermittent avalanche dynamics and the authors show how these relate to the crack growth law parameters.
Highlights
Fracture presents interesting fundamental science questions since the strength of materials as a concept has to deal with scales from the atomistic to the engineering of materials
Our work concentrates on the stochastic nature of fatigue crack growth (FCG): We investigate the dynamics on timescales shorter than on which selfsimilar growth laws are formulated
What we find when following in detail the fatigue crack growth is that the crack tip undergoes intermittent motion
Summary
Fracture presents interesting fundamental science questions since the strength of materials as a concept has to deal with scales from the atomistic to the engineering of materials. Statistical physics has had an impact on fracture mechanics due to an understanding of the fluctuations in failure [5] such as in the depinning transition of cracks under applied loads [6,7,8,9,10,11] and creep dynamics as the thermally assisted motion of the crack tip [12,13,14]. We take such a “crackling noise” [15] approach to fatigue crack growth (FCG). The crack tip jumps are widely distributed and the averaged growth law depends on the distribution and how it evolves with growth
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