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Abstract:
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As polymers are made from long macromolecular chains, their deformation mechanismsare related with the sliding between these chains as threads in a cloth, this can be a littleexplanation of tearing. Now then, if during the load application the component is inyielding and it has a stress concentrator, as a crack may be, this sliding occurs in a stablemanner and the stable crack growth is shown. In this work, complete-fracture crack testswhere carried out for an Ethylene-Propylene Block Copolymer film prepared on DDENTspecimens with two sharpening methods; by razor blade and by femtolaser beam. TheLoad-Displacement plots and the ligament length evolution for all specimens wererecorded using a Digital Image Correlation System to approach the complete crackbehavior, describing the EWF conventional method in the crack extension process. Themain results of this work aim to say that the initiation of crack propagation occurs whenthe area under the load-displacement curve reaches the we value. This start ofpropagation shall be given by the material as a function of the initial crack conditions. |