It is well established that rapidly propagating cracks in brittle material are unstable such that they generate side branches. It is also known that cracks are attracted by free surfaces, which means that they attract each other. This information is used here to formulate a generic model of fragmentation in which the small-size part of the fragment-size distribution results from merged crack branches in the damage zones along the paths of the propagating cracks. This model is solved under rather general assumptions for the fragment-size distribution. The model leads to a generic distribution $S^{-\gamma }\exp (-S∕S_0)$ for fragment sizes $S$, where $\gamma =\frac{2d-1}{d}$ with $d$ the Euclidean dimension, and $S_0$ is a material dependent parameter.

• Received 2 March 2007

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.76.026112