Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the fracture of glassy polymers at high loading rates, where thermal effects due to self-heating of the material can become important. A coupled thermomechanical, small-scale yielding calculation is performed that incorporates a recent cohesive zone model for crazing while a viscoplastic model is used to describe shear yielding. When crazing takes place, this mechanism is identified as the major heat source for the temperature increase while the conversion of bulk viscoplasticity to heat appears to be negligible. At sufficiently high remote loading rates, the glass transition temperature can be reached next to the craze but the hot zone is too small to promote thermal blunting by large plastic deformations near the crack tip. Since crack growth is caused by craze breakdown, the evolution of the toughness with increasing loading rate is primarily governed by the craze properties. Their rate dependence can partially explain the brittle to ductile transition.
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