Publications Details
Kinetics of Failure in an Elastic Peridynamic Material
The dynamic behavior of an elastic peridynamic material with a nonconvex bond potential is studied. In spite of the material's inherently unstable nature, initial value problems can be solved using essentially the same techniques as with conventional materials. In a suitably constructed material model, small perturbations grow exponentially over time until the material fails. The time for this growth is computed explicitly for a stretching bar that passes from the stable to the unstable phase of the material model. This time to failure represents an incubation time for the nucleation of a crack. The finiteness of the failure time in effect creates a rate dependence in the failure properties of the material. Thus, the unstable nature of the elastic material leads to a rate effect even though it does not contain any terms that explicitly include a strain rate dependence.