Gilles Francfort, Alessandro Giacomini and Oscar
Lopez-Pamies
Vol. 12 (2019), No. 2, 417–447
DOI: 10.2140/apde.2019.12.417
Abstract
Recent experimental evidence on rubber has revealed that the internal cracks
that arise out of the process, often referred to as cavitation, can actually
heal.
We demonstrate that crack healing can be incorporated into the variational
framework for quasistatic brittle fracture evolution that has been developed in the
last twenty years. This will be achieved for two-dimensional linearized elasticity in a
topological setting, that is, when the putative cracks are closed sets with a preset
maximum number of connected components.
Other important features of cavitation in rubber, such as near incompressibility
and the evolution of the fracture toughness as a function of the cumulative history of
fracture and healing, have yet to be addressed even in the proposed topological
setting.