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The phase field fracture method has emerged as a promising computational tool for modelling a variety of problems including, since recently, hydrogen embrittlement and stress corrosion cracking. In this work, we demonstrate the potential of…
Crack advance from short or long pre-cracks is predicted by the progressive failure of a cohesive zone in a strain gradient, elasto-plastic solid. The presence of strain gradients leads to the existence of an elastic zone at the tip of a…
The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical…
We present a treatment of cold hydrogen-antihydrogen collisions based on the asymptotic properties of atom-antiatom interactions. We derive general formulas for the elastic and inelastic cross sections and for the scattering lengths and…
We address the flutter instability of a flexible plate immersed in an axial flow. This instability is similar to flag flutter and results from the competition between destabilising pressure forces and stabilising bending stiffness. In…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
We analyse linear stability of interfacial waves in an idealised model of an aluminium reduction cell consisting of two stably stratified liquid layers which carry a vertical electric current in a collinear external magnetic field. If the…
We study the structure and the dynamics in the formation of irreversible gels by means of molecular dynamics simulation of a model system where the gelation transition is due to the random percolation of permanent bonds between neighboring…
The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…
We present a phase field modeling framework for hydrogen assisted cracking. The model builds upon a coupled mechanical and hydrogen diffusion response, driven by chemical potential gradients, and a hydrogen-dependent fracture energy…
In studies of the dynamic failure of brittle hydrogels, a bound has been placed on the process zone scale - the scale where material separation and ultimate failure occur. For the polyacrylamide hydrogel system under study, this bound is…
We study how the rigidity transition in a triangular lattice changes as a function of anisotropy by preferentially filling bonds on the lattice in one direction. We discover that the onset of rigidity in anisotropic spring networks arises…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
As shown by Wrobel et al. (2017), the hydraulically induced tangential traction on fracture walls changes local displacement and stress fields. This resulted in the formulation of a new hydraulic fracture (HF) propagation condition based on…
We investigate the dynamics of alginate gels, an important class of biopolymer-based viscoelastic materials, by combining mechanical tests and non-conventional, time-resolved light scattering methods. Two relaxation modes are observed upon…
A conception of inhomogeneous locally random distribution of microdefects in crystalline solids is proposed. A method to calculate some physical properties of solids, containing inhomogeneously distributed defects, is developed. A…
A discrete model describing defects in crystal lattices and having the standard linear anisotropic elasticity as its continuum limit is proposed. The main ingredients entering the model are the elastic stiffness constants of the material…
We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding…
The failure of brittle solids involves, before macroscopic rupture, power-law distributed avalanches of local rupture events whereby microcracks nucleate and grow, which are also observed in for an elastic interface evolving in a…
We examine the atomistic scale dependence of material's resistance-to-failure by numerical simulations and analytical analysis in electrical analogs of brittle crystals. We show that fracture toughness depends on the lattice geometry in a…