Rupture phenomena in viscoelastic materials

A failure theory for high polymers is developed from the hypothesis that weak regions exist in the material. Defects nucleate in these regions through bond rupture until the defects reach a size which is critical for the applied boundary loading. This critical condition is based on energy balance considerations. By considering the relaxation of the polymer chain in terms of the phenomenological stress-strain behavior and the rupture of chemical bonds in terms of an Arrhenius type rate law, the theory is able to accommodate an arbitrary stress or strain history, and shows reasonably good agreement with experiments which cover a large range of conditions. In addition the stress analysis of a special crack geometry is presented. The geometry consists of a thin infinite strip containing a semi-infinite crack. For a uniform separation of the infinite boundaries an infinitesimal elasticity solution is obtained with the help of the Fourier transform and Wiener-Hopf techniques. The effect of large strains on the stresses near the crack tip is studied experimentally and a surprising correlation with the infinitesimal elasticity solution is found