An isolated cohesive crack in tension

The shape of the back-calculated stress-separation curves obtained from the in-situ fracture of first-year sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic is convex, and radically different from those for concrete. In these tests, the process zone size changes with crack growth, but the nature of this change differs with the test conditions, load-control or displacement control. These results prompted a closer examination of the cohesive crack model using the simplest cracked configuration, a finite cohesive crack in an infinite elastic medium loaded in tension by a uniform stress at infinity. Different types of strain softening are examined: rectangular softening, linear softening, prescribed cohesive stresses, and prescribed cohesive crack-opening displacements. For each of these cases, crack nucleation is examined; close attention is paid to test control conditions, be they load-control or fixed-grip. The test control conditions alter the fracture, crack nucleation, crack growth, and process zone size behavior significantly. Accurate approximate solutions to linear softening are presented and examined.