TY - JOUR T1 - A Viscosity-driven crack evolution JF - Advances in Calculus of Variations 5 (2012) 433-483 Y1 - 2012 A1 - Simone Racca AB -

We present a model of crack growth in brittle materials which couples dissipative effects on the crack tip and viscous effects. We consider the 2 -dimensional antiplane case with pre-assigned crack path, and firstly prove an existence result for a rate-dependent evolution problem by means of time-discretization. The next goal is to describe the rate-independent evolution as limit of the rate-dependent ones when the dissipative and viscous effects vanish. The rate-independent evolution satisfies a Griffith’s criterion for the crack growth, but, in general, it does not fulfil a global minimality condition; its fracture set may exhibit jump discontinuities with respect to time. Under suitable regularity assumptions, the quasi-static crack growth is described by solving a finite-dimensional problem.

PB - SISSA UR - http://hdl.handle.net/1963/5130 U1 - 4944 U2 - Mathematics U3 - Functional Analysis and Applications U4 - -1 ER -