Exciting news! We're transitioning to the Statewide California Earthquake Center. Our new website is under construction, but we'll continue using this website for SCEC business in the meantime. We're also archiving the Southern Center site to preserve its rich history. A new and improved platform is coming soon!

A Micromechanics Based Constitutive Model For Brittle Failure at High Strain Rates

Harsha S. Bhat, Ares J. Rosakis, & Charles G. Sammis

Published April 2012, SCEC Contribution #1598

The micromechanical damage mechanics formulated by Ashby and Sammis [1] and generalized by Desh- pande and Evans [2] has been extended to allow for a more generalized stress state and to incorporate an experimentally motivated new crack growth (dam- age evolution) law that is valid over a wide range of loading rates. This law is sensitive to both the crack tip stress field and its time derivative. Incorporating this feature produces additional strain-rate sensitivity in the constitutive response. The model is also exper- imentally verified by predicting the failure strength of Dionysus-Pentelicon marble over strain rates ranging from āˆ¼ 10āˆ’6 to 103 sāˆ’1. Model parameters determined from quasi-static experiments were used to predict the failure strength at higher loading rates. Agreement with experimental results was excellent.

Citation
Bhat, H. S., Rosakis, A. J., & Sammis, C. G. (2012). A Micromechanics Based Constitutive Model For Brittle Failure at High Strain Rates. Journal of Applied Mechanics, 79(3). doi: 10.1115/1.4005897.