Dislocation Based Fracture Mechanics

Book excerpt: The dislocation is the basic building block of the crack in an elastic-plastic solid. Fracture mechanics is developed in this text from its dislocation foundation. It is the only text to do so. It is written for the graduate student and the new investigator entering the fracture field as well as the experienced scientist who has not used the dislocation approach. The dislocation mechanics needed to find the dislocation density fields of crack tip plastic zones is developed in detail. All known dislocation based solutions are given for the three types of cracks in elastic-plastic solids are given.