Thermal dissipation as both the strength and weakness of matter. A material failure prediction by monitoring creep.

In any domain involving some stressed solids, that is, from seismology to general engineering, the strength of matter is a paramount feature to understand. We here discuss the ability of a simple thermally activated sub-critical model, which includes the auto-induced thermal evolution of cracks tips, to predict the catastrophic failure of a vast range of materials. It is in particular shown that the intrinsic surface energy barrier, for breaking the atomic bonds of many solids, can be easily deduced from the slow creeping dynamics of a crack. This intrinsic barrier is however higher than the macroscopic load threshold at which brittle matter brutally fails, possibly as a result of thermal activation and of a thermal weakening mechanism. We propose a novel method to compute this macroscopic energy release rate of rupture, Ga, solely from monitoring slow creep, and we show that this reproduces the experimental values within 50% accuracy over twenty different materials, and over more than four decades of fracture energy.