At the risk of being unfair, we credit first and foremost A. A. Griffith for developing the field of brittle fracture. His views were that cracks are the macroscopic manifestation of putative debonding at the crystalline level, that this process can be accurately portrayed through an energy density at each point of the crack surface and that crack propagation results from the competition between bulk energy away from the crack and surface energy on the crack. Contemporary fracture mechanics has completely espoused Griffith’s viewpoint.
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© 2008 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
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(2008). Introduction. In: The Variational Approach to Fracture. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6395-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6395-4_1
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