Crack tip strain field around a growing crack: 2D simulation

This resource is a video, illustrating how the stress field around a crack grows with the length of the crack, presented as a contour map. It was obtained by stitching together maps of the surface temperature (amplitude) captured with an infra-red camera during cyclic loading; and the temperature amplitude is directly proportional to the amplitude of the first stress invariant (sum of principal stresses), which drives the crack forward, based on the classical Paris law. So the crack growth will get faster and faster as the crack gets longer and eventually become unstable, leading to rupture. In-house software (FATCAT) was used to generate quantitative data rapidly from images generated by commercially available instrumentation. Courtesy of Francisco A. Diaz, University of Jaen, John R. Yates, The University of Manchester and Eann Patterson, The University of Liverpool. Released under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/