viscoelastic fracture

dear collegues

   I have been attracted recently by a theory from Shrimali and Lopez-Pamies which is based on experimental evidence obtained from Suo's group in Harvard in 2012 in a (limited, but significant) set of experiments on rubber.   The theory assumes that the stretch to nucleating a crack is constant and independent on stretch rate.  The theory is then built on that, to predict the increase of fracture energy with rate.