Fracture of ductile plastics

Ductile plastics can be characterized in terms of their Young’s modulus, yield stress and specific work of fracture. In presence of a notch, as often introduced in packaging, mechanical failure is localized due to the notch, and fracture necessarily involves yielding and plastic deformation. This work examines whether ductile fracture of certain plastics (PC, PP, HIPS, HDPE) can still be characterized in terms of a framework like one that has been successfully applied to describe phenomenology of brittle fracture [1]. Specifically, we investigate whether some material specific quantity, e.g., toughness like, can be identified and how such a parameter compares with the traditional characterization based on evaluation of the essential work [2].