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Crack Front Segmentation and Facet Coarsening in Mixed-Mode Fracture
Chih-Hung Chen1, Tristan Cambonie2, Veronique Lazarus2
1Physics Department and Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Complex Systems, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
Abstract:
A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We investigate facet propagation and coarsening using in situ microscopy observations of fracture surfaces at different stages of quasistatic mixed-mode crack propagation and phase-field simulations. The results demonstrate that the bifurcation from propagating a planar to segmented crack front is strongly subcritical, reconciling previous theoretical predictions of linear stability analysis with experimental observations. They further show that facet coarsening is a self-similar process driven by a spatial period-doubling instability of facet arrays.
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