The surface-forming energy release rate versus the local energy release rate

Abstract: This paper identifies two ways to extract the energy (or power) flowing into a crack tip during propagation based on the power balance of areas enclosed by a stationary contour and a comoving contour. It is very interesting to find a contradiction that two corresponding energy release rates (ERRs), a surface-forming ERR and a local ERR, are different when stress singularity exists at a crack tip. Besides a rigorous mathematical interpretation, we deduce that the stress singularity leads to an accompanying kinetic energy at the crack tip. The local ERR represents the driving force to overcome the surface energy and the accompanying kinetic energy, while the surface-forming ERR represents the driving force to overcome the surface energy only. Their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. We recommend using the surface-forming ERR based fracture criterion for a crack propagation in elastic-plastic materials, since it has a wide applicability and concise formulae which are easy to compute among all energy based criteria.