How super-tough gels break
Soft Condensed Matter
2018-10-03 v1 Materials Science
Abstract
Fracture of highly stretched materials challenges our view of how things break. We directly visualize rupture of tough double-network (DN) gels at >50\% strain. During fracture, crack tip shapes obey a power-law, in contrast to the parabolic profile observed in low-strain cracks. A new length-scale emerges from the power-law; we show that scales directly with the stored elastic energy, and diverges when the crack velocity approaches the shear wave speed. Our results show that DN gels undergo brittle fracture, and provide a testing ground for large-strain fracture mechanics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1808.07902,
title = {How super-tough gels break},
author = {Itamar Kolvin and John M. Kolinski and Jian Ping Gong and Jay Fineberg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07902},
year = {2018}
}