Effective toughness of disordered brittle solids: A homogenization framework

This paper addresses the question of the homogenization of fracture properties for three-dimensional disordered brittle solids. The effective toughness, identified as the minimum elastic energy release rate required to ensure crack growth, is predicted from a semi-analytical framework inspired by both micromechanics and statistical physics, that encompasses the decisive influences of both the material disorder and the mechanisms of interaction between a crack and heterogeneities. Theoretical predictions are compared to numerical values of the effective toughness that are computed with the fracture-mechanics-based semi-analytical method of Lebihain et al. (2020). Based on a perturbative approach of Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics, this method allows for the efficient computation of crack propagation under tensile Mode I loading in composite materials containing several millions of inclusions, where the crack interacts with them through two mechanisms : crossing, wherein the crack penetrates the inclusion, and by-pass, wherein the crack wanders out-of-plane and follows the inclusion/matrix interface. We show that our homogenization procedure provides an accurate prediction of the homogenized fracture properties for a broad range of microstructural parameters such as the inclusion toughness, density or shape. This original theoretical framework constitutes a powerful mean to connect the microstructural parameters of materials to their crack growth resistance, beyond the particular cases considered in the simulations performed. As a result, it provides new strategies for the rational design of optimized brittle composites with tailored fracture properties.