The delayed fracture of an isotropic viscoelastic plate with a microcrack under a varying load.

The delayed fracture of an isotropic viscoelastic plate due to subcritical growth of a rectilinear microcrack of normal separation is studied. The paper deals with the development of the crack due to the stretching of the plate by uniformly distributed increasing and cyclic external loads applied perpendicularly to the crack line. The investigation is carried out within the framework of the Boltzmann-Volterra theory for resolvent integral operators of difference type, which describe the deformation of materials with time-dependent rheological properties. Numerical calculations are performed for resolvent integral operators with a kernel in the form of Rabotnov's fractional-exponential function. The kinetics of a crack with a tip zone commensurable with the crack length is studied. The results are compared with those obtained on the basis of the hypothesis on the thin structure of the crack tip. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]