Roughness of a mode I in-plane crack front propagating along a heterogeneous cohesive interface

The roughness of the crack front of an interfacial crack propagating along a weak plane in a heterogeneous disordered medium has been repeatedly studied both experimentally and numerically. For an interfacial toughness varying randomly on the interface, the front is self-affine. Quite often, however, the calculated roughness exponent differs from the experimental estimate. Several theoretical models have been employed up to now in the numerical...