A Virtual Internal Bond Approach to Fracture Simulatiion

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We propose a novel cohesive theory of fracture based on a method of constructing continuum constitutive models from an empirical cohesive force law. This theory is aimed to overcome some of the limitations of the conventional theory of fracture mechanics applications involving crack nucleation and growth in micron scale structures where fracture toughness becomes sensitively dependent on device geometry. In comparison with the cohesive surface models (Xu and Needleman, 1994; Camacho and Ortiz, 1996) in which a set of discrete cohesive surfaces having finite work of fracture and finite cohesive strength is introduced at the stage of finite element discretization, we propose to embed a cohesive force law directly into the constitutive model. Our preliminary studies (Gao and Klein, 1998; Klein and Gao, 1998) have shown that this type of approach is practically feasible.