Abstract
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving free boundary. We focus on failure via a cavitation instability in a radially symmetric stressed material and set up the free boundary dynamics taking both elasticity and viscoplasticity into account using the recently proposed athermal shear transformation zone theory. We demonstrate that this theory predicts the existence (in amorphous systems) of fast cavitation modes accompanied by extensive plastic deformations and discuss the revealed physics.
- Received 11 July 2007
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.025101
©2008 American Physical Society