ON ABSENCE OF QUANTITATIVE CORRELATIONS BETWEEN STRENGTH AND STIFFNESS IN MICROCRACKING MATERIALS

摘要

We show, by numerical simulations on crack arrays, that there is no stable quantitative correlation between strength of a brittle microcracking material and its effective elastic stiffness. The reason is that fracture processes are controlled by "details" of microcrack field geometry - such as local clusters of closely spaced cracks - to which the stiffness, being a volume average quantity, is almost insensitive.