Abstract
It is evident from the preceding chapters that many plastics, particularly glassy polymers, are susceptible to brittle fracture. This is because although energy absorbing processes such as crazing or shear yielding mechanisms operate in these polymers they do so only in highly localised regions around the crack tip. This arises from strain softening and geometric considerations, as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Thus, while these mechanisms involve large plastic strains and considerable local energy absorption by the material, the fact that they are confined to a very small volume compared to the size of the specimen means that the total amount of plastic energy absorbed is low.
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