QUANTITATIVE CHARACTERIZATION OF MICROCRACKING IN BRITTLE MATERIALS BY FINITE-ELEMENT MODELING

A numerical procedure is described for directly simulating the generat ion of a microcrack process zone around a crack during loading. The in teractions between microcrack-microcrack and microcrack-main crack wer e realized and certain effects of interaction predicted by the theoret ical model are corroborated by the numerical analyses. However, as our model takes several interactions, e.g. interactions among microcracks , into account, some essential features of microcracking revealed by t he simulation are physically different from the prime hypothesis of th e continuum model and provide some insights into the toughening mechan isms of microcracking.