The growth process of cavities nucleated at the interface between a rigid surface and a soft adhesive layer has been investigated with a probe method. A tensile stress was applied to the highly confined layer resulting in a negative hydrostatic pressure in the layer. The statistics of appearance and rate of growth of cavities as a function of applied negative stress were monitored with a CCD camera. If large germs of cavities were initially present, most of the cavities became optically visible above a critical level of stress independent of layer thickness. Cavities grew simultaneously and at the same expansion rate as a function of applied stress. In the absence of large germs, cavities became optically visible one after another, reaching a limiting size controlled by the thickness of the layer independently and very rapidly. Although, for each sample, we observed a statistical distribution of critical stress levels where a cavity expanded, the mean cavitation stress depended both on surface topography and more surprisingly on layer thickness. We believe that this new and somewhat surprising result can be interpreted with a model for the growth of small germs in finite size layers (J. Dollhofer, A. Chiche, V. Muralidharan et al., Int. J. Solids Struct. 41, 6111 (2004)). This model is mainly based on the dual notion of an energy activated transition from an unexpanded metastable state to an expanded stable state and to the proportionality of the activation energy with the elastic energy stored in the adhesive layer.
Interfacial toughness is enhanced when the mode-mixity of the biaxial near-tip stress state approaches mode II. Conversely, when the near-tip mode-mixity is close to pure mode I, the interfacial toughness curve exhibits a minimum. This toughness minimum is believed to represent the so-called intrinsic adhesion. Within linear elasticity, the biaxial, singular near-tip solution for an open interface crack may be employed for characterizing the local stress state as long as non-linearities due to crack-wall contact and plastic ow are contained within a length scale small enough compared to the extension of the near-tip opening-dominated elds. In the present work, the interfacial mixedmode fracture toughness curve was determined for a polyethylene/ glass compound. Subsequent to the reduction of experimental data based on the linear-elastic crack model, the applicability of linearelastic fracture mechanics is veri ed by comparing the estimated extension of the plastic zones to the extension of the K -dominance zone. It is found that within the mixed-mode range accessible to linear-elastic fracture mechanics the apparent interfacial fracture toughness varies by about an order of magnitude.
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