The effect of crack blunting on the competition between dislocation nucleation and cleavage (Q5930719)

This work deals with the effects of crack tip blunting on dislocation nucleation and crack advance due to atomic decohesion. The authors aim to resolve a disparity between the results obtained from continuum mechanics and lattice theory. A slender elliptical crack in an infinite medium is considered. The bluntness of the crack tip is measured by the radius of tip curvature. Within the framework of two-dimensional homogeneous isotropic linear elasticity, the authors express in terms of well-known complex potentials the stress fields generated by a uniaxial traction perpendicular to the crack plane and by an edge dislocation in a vicinity of the crack situated at arbitrary point of the slip plane intersecting the crack tip. Applied stress induces a shear stress distribution along the slip plane. A nonlinear integral equation for the determination of local slip displacement is written out in terms of the dislocation self-stress, the applied shear stress along the slip plane, and the restoring shear stress due to local slip displacement. Frenkel expression is employed to model the relation between the restoring shear stress and the slip displacement. The integral equation is solved numerically for increasing applied stress intensities, at a critical value of which it is observed that the integral equation cannot be solved due to instability. This value is used to calculate the critical energy release rate for dislocation nucleation. A similar approach is employed to obtain the opening displacements along the propagating crack front, where a simple exponential expression is adopted to represent the relation between opening stress and opening displacements. Again, if the loading is increased, an instability is reached in the solution of nonlinear integral equation determining the opening displacement. This critical value is used to evaluate the critical energy release rate for atomic decohesion. Critical energy rates for nucleation and decohesion are plotted for various crack lengths and bluntness parameters. Two such treshold curves are compared simultaneously to determine which failure mode is energetically more likely at various bluntness parameters. It is then deduced that four possible types of failures are identifiable: intrinsically brittle, quasi-brittle, intrinsically ductile and quasi-ductile. The theoretical results are also applied to real materials such as silicon (intrinsically brittle), iron (quasi-brittle) and aluminum (intrinsically ductile).