Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2008
The propagation of fractures in a solid undergoing cyclic loadingsis known as the fatigue phenomenon. In this paper, we present a time continuousmodel for fatigue, in the special situation of the debonding of thin layers,coming from a time discretized version recently proposed byJaubert and Marigo [C. R. Mecanique333 (2005) 550–556].Under very general assumptions on the surface energy density andon the applied displacement, we discuss the well-posedness of ourproblem and we give the main properties of the evolution process.