What is the minimum volume requirement for specimens and models to guarantee representative behavior of microstructurally small cracks?
Ph.D. student and NDSEG Fellow, Karen DeMille, recently published a paper in Engineering Fracture Mechanics that seeks to answer this very question. She found that the answer depends upon the microstructural arrangement near the crack front as well as the boundary conditions. Her work provides a closed-form approximation for experimentalists and modelers to quickly estimate, under certain assumptions, how much volume would be needed to guarantee that crack-front fields are converged and therefore representative of a crack in a larger structure. Follow this link or contact an MMM Lab member to learn more!
