ABSTRACT: In statistical damage mechanics, a deterministic failure limit surface is replaced with a scale-dependent family of quantile surfaces. An idealized homogeneous isotropic matrix material containing cracks of random size and orientation is used to elucidate expected mathematical character
of aleatory uncertainty and scale effects for initiation of damage in a brittle material. Scope is limited to statistics and scale dependence for the ONSET (not subsequent progression) of shear-driven failure. Exact analytical solutions for probability of such failure (with an interesting pole-point visualization) are derived for axisymmetric extension or compression of a single-crack sample. A semi-analytical bound on the failure CDF is found for a multi-crack specimen by integrating the single-crack probability over an exponential crack size distribution for which the majority of flaws are small enough to be safe from failure at any orientation. Resulting tails of the predicted failure distribution differ from Weibull theory,
especially in the third invariant.

Selected cool pictures (see the article for more images):

Bibtex data:
@ARTICLE{BrannonStatistics2014,
author = {R. M. Brannon and T. J. Gowen},
title = {Aleatory quantile surfaces in damage mechanics},
journal = {Journal of the European Ceramic Society},
year = {2014},
volume = {34},
pages = {2643–2653},
number = {11}
}