Fracture propagation in brittle granular matter

Abstract

It is nearly a century since Alan Arnold Griffith developed his energy criterion for the fracture propagation of cracks in ‘near-continuous’ solids. Needless to say that his celebrated work has revolutionized the world of material science. In a very succinct way, Griffith connected between three important aspects of the fracture process: (i) the material, (ii) the stress level, and (iii) the geometry of the crack. Nothing similar was developed for brittle granular matter, although in these materials fracture propagates in the sense of comminution. Recently, I have developed an energy theory, called breakage mechanics, based on the concept of breakage. However, the analogy between the mechanics of breakage and fracture is missing. Here I establish this relation using energy principles and derive a critical comminution pressure for brittle granular materials. This critical pressure is surprisingly complementary to Griffith's critical tensile stress for near-continuous materials. This step enables for the first time to apply the principles of fracture mechanics to all disciplines dealing with confined particles comminution such as geophysics, geology, geotechnical engineering, mineral processing, agriculture and food industry, pharmaceutics and powder technology.