English

Mechanical Failure of a Small and Confined Solid

Soft Condensed Matter 2007-05-23 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Starting from a commensurate triangular thin solid strip, confined within two hard structureless walls, a stretch along its length introduces a rectangular distortion. Beyond a critical strain the solid fails through nucleation of "smectic"-like bands. We show using computer simulations and simple density functional based arguments, how a solid-smectic transition mediates the failure. Further, we show that the critical strain introducing failure is {\em inversely} proportional to the channel width i.e. thinner strips are stronger!

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0508513,
  title  = {Mechanical Failure of a Small and Confined Solid},
  author = {Debasish Chaudhuri and Surajit Sengupta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0508513},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

6 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Indian Journal of Physics (in press) as a Conference proceeding of CMDAYS-04

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