Gianni Dal Maso

International School for Advanced Studies

New results on the jerky crack growth in elastoplastic materials

In the framework of a model for the quasistatic crack growth in elasto-plastic homogeneous materials in the planar case, we study the properties of the length of the crack as a function of time. We prove that, under suitable technical assumptions on the crack path, this monotone function is a pure jump function. Under stronger assumptions we prove also that the number of jumps is finite.