A new approach to irreversible quasistatic fracture growth is given, by means of Young measures.The study concerns a cohesive zone model with prescribed crack path, when the material gives different responses to loading and unloading phases.In the particular situation of constant unloading response,the result contained in [G. Dal Maso and C. Zanini,Proc. Roy. Soc. Edinburgh Sect. A137 (2007) 253–279] is recovered.In this case, the convergence of the discrete time approximationsis improved.

Rate-independent evolution for material models with nonconvexelastic energies is studied without any spatial regularization ofthe inner variable; due to lack of convexity, the model is developedin the framework of Young measures. An existence result for thequasistatic evolution is obtained in terms of compatible systems ofYoung measures. We also show as this result can be equivalentlyreformulated with probabilistic language and leads to thedescription of the quasistatic evolution in terms of stochasticprocesses on a suitable probability space.

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.

This work is concerned with the reformulation of evolutionary problems in a weak form enabling consideration of solutions that may exhibit evolving microstructures. This reformulation is accomplished by expressing the evolutionary problem in variational form, i.e., by identifying a functional whose minimizers represent entire trajectories of the system. The particular class of functionals under consideration is derived by first defining a sequence of time-discretized minimum problems and subsequently formally passing to the limit of continuous time. The resulting functionals may be regarded as aweighted dissipation-energy functional with a weight decaying with a rate $1/\epsilon$ . The corresponding Euler-Lagrange equation leads to anelliptic regularization of the original evolutionary problem. The Γ-limit of these functionals for $\epsilon\to 0$ is highlydegenerate and provides limited information regarding the limiting trajectories of the system. Instead we seek to characterize the minimizing trajectories directly. The special class of problems characterized by a rate-independent dissipation functional is amenable to a particularly illuminating analysis. For these systems it is possible to derive a priori bounds that are independent of the regularizing parameter, whence it is possible to extract convergent subsequences and find the limiting trajectories. Under general assumptions on the functionals, we show that all such limits satisfy the energetic formulation (S) & (E) for rate-independent systems. Moreover, we show that the accumulation points of the regularized solutions solve the associated limiting energetic formulation.