ORIGINAL PAPER Crack propagation in brittle heterogeneous solids: Material disorder and crack dynamics

Abstract Crack propagation in a linear elastic mate-rial with weakly inhomogeneous failure properties is analyzed. An equation of motion for the crack is derived in the limit of slow velocity. Predictions of this equation on both the average crack growth velocity and its fluc-tuations are compared with recent experimental results performed on brittle heterogeneous materials (Ponson in Phys Rev Lett, 103, 055501; Måløy et al. in Phys Rev Lett, 96, 045501). They are found to reproduce quantitatively the main features of crack propagation in disordered systems. This theoretical framework pro-vides new tools to predict life time and fracture energy of materials from their properties at the micro-scale