The configurational-forces view of the nucleation and propagation of fracture and healing in elastomers as a phase transition

In a recent contribution, Kumar et al. (J Mech Phys Solids 112:523–551, 2018) have introduced a macroscopic theory aimed at describing, explaining, and predicting the nucleation and propagation of fracture and healing in elastomers undergoing arbitrarily large quasistatic deformations. The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative derivation of this theory—originally constructed as a generalization of the variational theory of brittle fracture of Francfort and Marigo (J Mech Phys Solids 46:1319–1342, 1998) to account for physical attributes innate to elastomers that have been recently unveiled by experiments at high spatio-temporal resolution—cast as a phase transition within the framework of configurational forces. A second objective of this paper is to deploy the theory to probe new experimental results on healing in silicone elastomers.