Effect of Crack Blunting on the Ductile-Brittle Response of Crystalline Materials

We propose a self-consistent criterion for crack propagation versus dislocation emission, taking into account the effects of crack-tip blunting. Continuum concepts are used to evaluate the evolving competition between crack advance and dislocation nucleation as a function of crack- tip curvature. This framework is used to classify crystals as intrinsically ductile or brittle in terms of the unstable stacking energy, the surface energy, and the peak cohesive stresses achieved during opening and shear of the atomic planes. We find that ductile-brittle criteria based on the assumption that the crack is ideally sharp capture only two of the four possible fracture regimes. One implication of the present analysis is that a crack may initially emit dislocations, only to reinitiate cleavage upon reaching a sufficiently blunted crack-tip geometry.

Macrocrack-Microdefect Interaction

Elastic interactions (in terms of the stress intensity factor variation) of the macrocrack (represented as semi-infinite crack) with microdefects such as finite size, arbitrarily positioned crack, circular hole or inclusion are considered. A solution for the problem of the interaction with dilational inclusion is also given. The influence of the crack tip geometry on the surrounding stress field is studied by analyzing the case of crack-hole coalescence. Problems are considered in terms of complex stress potentials for linear elasticity and formulated as a singular integral equation on the semi-infinite interval. A stable numerical technique is developed for the solution of such equations. In a particular case, in order to evaluate the accuracy of the numerical procedure, results obtained through the numerical procedure are compared with the available analytical solution and found to be in excellent agreement.