Incubation time based testing of materials

Some principal features of the behavior of materials subjected to pulsed actions are common for a number of seemingly quite different physical processes, such as dynamic fracture (starting cracks and scabbing), cavitation in liquids, and electrical breakdown in solids. In this paper, we analyze examples illustrating typical dynamic effects inherent in these processes. We propose a unified interpretation for the fracture of solids and liquids and electrical breakdown in insulators using the structural-time approach based on the concept of the fracture incubation time. The examples of different physical processes considered in the paper show the fundamental importance of investigating incubation processes preparing abrupt structural changes (fracture and phase transitions) in continua under intense pulsed actions. The fracture incubation time is evidently a universal basic characteristic of the dynamic strength and must become one of the main material parameters to be experimentally determined (measured).