Numerical study of the probability of fracture of glass under stress corrosion

The purpose of this paper is to examine the eect of a population of surface aws on the time to failure of glass under static loading and subject to stress corrosion.The roughness of the glass surface is mapped onto a set of parallel elliptical cracks.The presence of the cracks modies the stress eld within the material and induces a shielding of the stress at the cracks tips which increases the lifetime of the material.We show that this eect b e c o m e s important when the length of the cracks is comparable to the distance separating them.