Engineering Commons^™

Micromechanisms Of Fracture Propagation In Glassy Polymers, Matteo Ciccotti, Matthieu George, Yannick Nziakou, Guillaume Fischer, Anne-Caroline Genix, Bruno Bresson, Stéphane Roux

International Workshop on the Environmental Damage in Structural Materials Under Static Load/Cyclic Loads at Ambient Temperatures

While most glassy polymers are nominally brittle at macroscopic scales, they are known to exhibit plastic deformation in indentation, scratching, and microcutting when the loaded region is sufficiently small. The same applies to the micrometer size process zone at the tip of a propagating crack. While the presence and approximate size of this microscale plastic zone is well described by the Dugdale model, the prediction of the toughness of these materials is not possible without accounting for the details of the local large strain field and the work hardening behaviour of these polymers, which can be inferred from their response …