“…Among the many researchers adopting the Gurson-Tvergaard (GT) theory to model crack growth include Needleman, Tvergaard and co-workers [9,16,17,18]; Brocks; et al [19], and most recently Xia and Shih [5,6,7]. Researchers adopting the Rousselier plastici~y theory to model crack extension include Pineau [20] and recent extensive work by Bilby, Howard and Li [21,22,23] aimed at predicting large-scale fracture tests. With a few recent exceptions [21,24,25], these efforts employed plane-strain idealizations due to the enormous computational costs incurred with fully 3-D models.…”