A possible link between brittle and ductile failure by viewing fracture as a topological defect

Abstract: A continuum model of fracture that describes, in principle, the propagation and interaction of arbitrary distributions of cracks and voids with evolving topology without a fracture criterion is developed. It involves a 'law of motion' for crack-tips, primarily as a kinematical consequence coupled with thermodynamics. Fundamental kinematics endows the crack-tip with a topological charge. This allows the association of a kinematical conservation law for the charge, resulting in a fundamental evolution equation for the crack-tip field, and in turn the crack field. The vectorial crack field degrades the elastic modulus in a physically justified anisotropic manner. The mathematical structure of this conservation law allows an additive 'free' gradient of a scalar field in the evolution of the crack field. We associate this naturally emerging scalar field with the porosity that arises in the modeling of ductile failure. Thus, porosity-rate gradients affect the evolution of the crack-field which, then, naturally degrades the elastic modulus, and it is through this fundamental mechanism that spatial gradients in porosity growth affects the strain-energy density and stress carrying capacity of the material - and, as a dimensional consequence related to fundamental kinematics, introduces a length-scale in the model. The key hypothesis of this work is that brittle fracture is energy-driven while ductile fracture is stress-driven; under overall shear loadings where mean stress vanishes or is compressive, shear strain energy can still drive shear fracture in ductile materials.