Nonlinear focusing in dynamic crack fronts and the micro-branching transition
Soft Condensed Matter
2017-11-29 v1 Materials Science
Pattern Formation and Solitons
Abstract
Cracks in brittle materials produce two types of generic surface structures: facets at low velocities and micro-branches at higher ones. Here we observe a transition from faceting to micro-branching in polyacrylamide gels that is characterized by nonlinear dynamic localization of crack fronts. To better understand this process we derive a first-principles nonlinear equation of motion for crack fronts in the context of scalar elasticity. Its solution shows that nonlinear focusing coupled to rate-dependence of dissipation governs the transition to micro-branching.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1710.06004,
title = {Nonlinear focusing in dynamic crack fronts and the micro-branching transition},
author = {Itamar Kolvin and Jay Fineberg and Mokhtar Adda-Bedia},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06004},
year = {2017}
}