Dissipation during crack growth in a viscoelastic material from a cohesive model for a finite specimen

Abstract In the present paper, we extend results recently given by Ciavarella et al. (J Mech Phys Solids 169:105096, 2022) to show some actual calculations of the viscoelastic dissipation in a crack propagation at constant speed in a finite size specimen. It is usually believed that the cohesive models introduced by Knauss and Schapery and the dissipation-based theories introduced by de Gennes and Persson-Brener give very similar results for steady state crack propagation in viscoelastic materials, where usually only the asymptotic singular field is used for the stress. We show however that dissipation and the energy balance never reach a steady state, despite the constant propagation crack rate and stress intensity factor. Our loading protocol permits a rigorous solution, and implies a short phase with constant specimen elongation rate, but then possibly a very long phase of constant or decreasing elongation, which differs from typical experiments. For the external work we are therefore unable to use the de Gennes and Persson-Brener theories which suggested that the increase of effective fracture energy would go up to the ratio of instantaneous to relaxed modulus, at very fast rates. We show viscoelastic dissipation is in general a transient quantity, which can vary by orders of magnitude while the stress intensity factor is kept constant, and is largely affected by dissipation in the bulk rather than at the crack tip. The total work to break a specimen apart is found also to be possibly arbitrarily large for quite a large range of intermediate crack growth rates.