Combined damaged elasticity and creep modeling of ceramics with wedge splitting tests

During the crack propagation in common refractory ceramics at high temperatures, creep may occur in the wake of a process zone and in front of a crack tip. To account for this phenomenon, an integrated material constitutive model was developed by combining the mechanical behavior following isotropic damaged elasticity concept and Norton-Bailey creep. The post peak fracture behavior followed the bilinear softening law and a simple criterion was defined to consider the creep asymmetricity in uniaxial tension and compression. The material constitutive model was applied to inversely identify mode I fracture parameters with wedge splitting tests of an alumina spinel material at 1200 °C. It showed that the mean ratio of the nominal notch tensile strength to the actual tensile strength was 1.93 and the mean pure fracture energy was 297.6 N/m. In addition, the creep contributed 12.9% on average into the total fracture energy.