Related papers: Drying Patterns: Sensitivity to Residual Stresses

We study the behavior of thin elastic sheets that are bent and strained under the influence of weak, smooth confinement. We show that the emerging shapes exhibit the coexistence of two types of domains that differ in their characteristic…

Experiments on a thin layer of cohesive wet granular matter under vertical vibrations reveal kink separated domains that collide with the container at different phases. Due to the strong cohesion arising from the formation of liquid bridges…

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…

Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling…

This paper is motivated by the complex blister patterns sometimes seen in thin elastic films on thick, compliant substrates. These patterns are often induced by an elastic misfit which compresses the film. Blistering permits the film to…

We investigate the initiation of cracks in vertically freestanding water-saturated colloidal pillars constructed using a direct-write technique. Paradoxically, the cracks form during drying at the free end, far from the substrate, where the…

When cracks form in a thin contracting layer, they sequentially break the layer into smaller and smaller pieces. A rectilinear crack pattern encodes information about the order of crack formation, as later cracks tend to intersect with…

Cohesive granular materials, like wet sand, retain their shape before yielding under stress. This solid-like behavior is associated with elasticity. As the loading increases, the material typically flows. However, cohesive materials can…

Prestrained elastic networks arise in a number of biological and technological systems ranging from the cytoskeleton of cells to tensegrity structures. To understand the response of such a network as a function of the prestrain, we consider…

A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…

Thin layers of elastomers bonded to two rigid plates demonstrate unusual failure response. Historically, it has been believed that strongly-bonded layers fail by two distinct mechanisms: (i) internal/external penny-shaped crack nucleation…

Stochastic models for pore collapse in granular materials are developed. First, a general fluctuating stress-strain relation for a plastic flow rule is derived. The fluctuations account for non-associativity in plastic deformations…

Dispersing small particles in a liquid can produce surprising behaviors when the solids fraction becomes large: rapid shearing drives these systems out of equilibrium and can lead to dramatic increases in viscosity (shear-thickening) or…

In viscoelastic materials, individually short-lived bonds collectively result in a mechanical resistance which is long-lived but finite, as ultimately cracks appear. Here we provide a microscopic mechanism by which cracks emerge from the…

Dynamical patterns in complex networks of coupled oscillators are both of theoretical and practical interest, yet to fully reveal and understand the interplay between pattern emergence and network structure remains to be an outstanding…

Straight cracks are observed in thin coatings under residual tensile stress, resulting into the classical network pattern observed in china crockery, old paintings or dry mud. Here, we present a novel fracture mechanism where delamination…

Mechanical reliability plays an outsized role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they can experience during manufacturing and operation. These devices are typically…

The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…

We study the elasto-plastic behaviour of materials made of individual (discrete) objects, such as a liquid foam made of bubbles. The evolution of positions and mutual arrangements of individual objects is taken into account through…

Quasi-brittle materials endowed with (statistically) self-similar hierarcical microstructures show distinct failure patterns that deviate from the standard scenario of damage accumulation followed by crack nucleation-and-growth. Here we…