Griffiths Approach Ceramics

Alan arnold griffith s energy based analysis of cracks in 1920 is considered to be the birth of the field of fracture mechanics 1.

Griffiths approach ceramics.

Flaws are considered to be pre existing or stress induced. Attention of ceramic science on the flaws and surface cracks that determine the strength of brittle materials. A copy of his paper can be found here. He was motivated by inglis s linear elastic solution for stresses around an elliptical hole 2 which predicted that the stress level approached infinity as the ellipse flattened to form a crack.

Griffith theory has been verified by experiments on glasses and polymers at low temperatures where a simple process of fracture by the propagation of elastic cracks occurs i e no plastic deformation occurs. Most industrial ceramics contain porosity and flaws of varying sizes and thus the strength varies from specimen to specimen. Fracture mechanics is the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the propagation of cracks in materials. The first category has two types of flaws.

Extrinsic flaws due to external conditions like machining and sintering and intrinsic flaws. Marinescu mariana pruteanu in handbook of ceramics grinding and polishing 2015. In modern materials science fracture mechanics is an important tool used to improve the. The griffith approach to fracture employs an energy balance and does.