Nano-ductile crack propagation in glasses under stress corrosion: spatiotemporal evolution of damage in the vicinity of the crack tip

Recent experiments have evidenced the existence of a ductile fracture mode at the nanometer scale in Aluminosilicate glass. The present study is designed to check whether such a ductile mode is inherent to the amorphous nature of glass. Therefore, the slow crack advance is observed in real time via an Atomic Force Microscope in a minimal glass, amorphous Silica, under stress corrosion. In this case, the Crack propagation proceeds by the nucleation, growth and coalescence of damage cavities as in the Aluminosilicate glass, but the cavity size is significantly larger. We focus here on the kinematics of crack propagation by looking at the spatio-temporal evolution of both the tip of the main crack and the cavity ahead. It is shown that the velocity of the main crack tip is significantly lower than the one of the cavity edge toward the main crack tip, like in metallic alloys. Moreover, the velocities of the different fronts (main crack, frontward and backward cavity tips) at these nanometric scales is one order of magnitude smaller than the crack tip velocity at the continuum scale. This has important consequences for the modelling of stress corrosion, especially at ultra-slow crack propagation. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.