Relaxation creep rupture of heterogeneous material under constant strain.

We focus on a system consisting of an elastic part and a damageable part in series, to study the relaxation creep rupture of a heterogeneous system subjected to a uniaxial constant strain applied instantaneously. The viscoelastic behavior of the damageable part is modeled by a fiber bundle model consisting of Kelvin-Voigt elements and global load sharing is assumed for the redistribution of load following fiber breaking in the damageable part. Analytical and numerical calculations show that the global relaxation creep rupture appears if the elastic energy stored in the elastic part exceeded the fracture energy of the damageable part.