Thermodynamic relationship between creep crack growth and creep deformation

Abstract

Crack growths processes of various types are widely covered by power laws. Especially, both creep deformation of creep-resistant bulk materials and creep crack growth in such materials can be covered by power laws and possess close exponents in many cases [1]. This paper focuses on the microscopic thermodynamic mechanisms of the correspondence and the power law itself. In this paper, it is shown that the power laws can be considered as certain homogenous kinetic rate laws of local or microscopic internal variables within the thermodynamic framework of Rice [2, 3] and correspond to a certain macroscopic requirement of maximum dissipation. It is revealed that nonlinear phenomenological equations and Onsager reciprocal relations emerge naturally from the framework if each rate is a monotonic increasing and homogeneous function of the same degree in its conjugate force. The homogeneity property transfers exactly from local internal variables to global internal variables. On the basis of the remarkable properties, it is shown that the power laws of crack growth directly lead to the refined Griffith criterion by Rice [4], and both exponents of creep deformation and creep crack growth can be related by a simple linear relation.