LOCAL MINIMALITY AND CRACK PREDICTION IN QUASI-STATIC GRIFFITH FRACTURE EVOLUTION

The mathematical analysis developed for energy minimizing fracture evolutions has been difficult to extend to locally minimizing evolutions. The reasons for this difficulty are not obvious, and our goal in this paper is to describe in some detail what precisely the issues are and why the previous analysis in fact cannot be extended to the most natural models based on local minimality. We also indicate how the previous methods can be modified for the analysis of models based on a recent definition of stability that is a bit stronger than local minimality.