Crack propagation in the power-law nonlinear viscoelastic material

An analysis on crack creep propagation problem of power-law nonlinear viscoelastic materials is presented. The Creep incompressilility assumption is used Tosimulate fracture behavior of craze region. it is assumed that in the .fracture processzone near the crack tip, the cohesive stress fo acts upon the crack surfaces and resistscrack opening. Through a perturbation method i. e., by superposing the Mode-Iapplied force onto a referential uniform stress state, which has a trivial solution and gives no effect on the solution of the original problem, the nonlinear viscoelasticproblem is reduced to linear problem. For weak nonlinear materials, for which thepower-law index n=1, the expressions of stress and crack surface displacement arederived. Then, the fracture process zone local energy criterion is proposed and basedon which the formulas of crucking incubation time t. and crack slow propagationvelocity a are derired.