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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 1: Internal Symposium: Physics of fracture

DY 1.1: Invited Talk

Monday, March 26, 2007, 09:30–10:00, H2

Towards a Dynamical Theory of Crack Propagation — •Itamar Procaccia — The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel

The failure of amorphous materials under stress often results in a crack, whose propagation is described by the dynamics of the free boundary between material and void. Due to the stress concentration (above the normal yield stress of the material) one must take into account plastic deformations. In this lecture I will describe the derivation of an Eulerian theory which respects all the conservation laws and all the symmetries, allowing a consistent description of the dynamics of free boundaries in elasto-plastic media. The interesting predictions of this theory will be exemplified in the context of a few examples.