  Cracks are created by massive breakage of molecular or atomic bonds. The
latter, in its turn, leads to the highly localized loss of material, which is
the reason why even closed cracks are visible by a naked eye. Thus, fracture
can be interpreted as the local material sink. Mass conservation is violated
locally in the area of material failure. We consider a theoretical formulation
of the coupled mass and momenta balance equations for a description of
fracture. Our focus is on brittle fracture and we propose a finite strain
hyperelastic thermodynamic framework for the coupled mass-flow-elastic boundary
value problem. The attractiveness of the proposed framework as compared to the
traditional continuum damage theories is that no internal parameters (like
damage variables, phase fields etc.) are used while the regularization of the
failure localization is provided by the physically sound law of mass balance.
