Related papers: Experimental analysis of lateral impact on planar …
We present an intuitive physical picture for fractures in nacre-type stratified materials via scaling arguments: strain distributions around a fracture are rather different depending on directions and size of fractures. We thus observe that…
An extensive experimental study of indentation and crack arrest statistics is presented for four different brittle materials (alumina, silicon carbide, silicon nitride, glass). Evidence is given that the crack length statistics can be…
We present an experimental investigation of the statistical properties of spherical granular particles on an inclined plane that are excited by an oscillating side-wall. The data is obtained by high-speed imaging and particle tracking…
The fragmentation of two aerospace aluminum alloys is investigated in a ground testing facility including mechanical loads as occurring due to aerodynamic forces in a real atmospheric entry event at three trajectory points. The emission…
We present an experimental and theoretical study of the fragmentation of polymeric materials by impacting polypropylene particles of spherical shape against a hard wall. Experiments reveal a power law mass distribution of fragments with an…
Fragmentation can be observed in nature and in everyday life on a wide range of length scales and for all kinds of technical applications. Most studies on dynamic failure focus on the behaviour of bulk systems in one, two and three…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
Extreme localization of damage in conventional brittle materials is the source of a host of undesirable effects. We show how artificially engineered metamaterials with all brittle constituents can be designed to ensure that every breakable…
We report observations of unusal \emph{first} plastic events in silica and metallic glasses in the shear startup regime at applied strain two orders of magnitude smaller than yield strain. The (non-Affine) particle displacement field during…
Fractal structures appear in a vast range of physical systems. A literature survey including all experimental papers on fractals which appeared in the six Physical Review journals (A-E and Letters) during the 1990's shows that experimental…
We present a numerical model for a two dimensional (2D) granular assembly, falling in a rectangular container when the bottom is removed. We observe the occurrence of cracks splitting the initial pile into pieces, like in experiments. We…
The two-dimensional oscillatory crack instability, experimentally observed in a class of brittle materials under strongly dynamic conditions, has been recently reproduced by a nonlinear phase-field fracture theory. Here we highlight the…
We study the phenomena associated with the low-velocity impact of two solid discs of equal size using a cell model of brittle solids. The fragment ejection exhibits a jet-like structure the direction of which depends on the impact…
A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We…
The morphology of fracture surfaces encodes the various complex damage and fracture processes occurring at the microstructure scale that have lead to the failure of a given heterogeneous material. Understanding how to decipher this…
The practical strength of oxide glasses is greatly reduced by surface flaws that form during processing and use. Instrumented indentation can mimic such real-life damage events and induce flaws and cracking under controlled conditions. At…
We investigated two-dimensional brittle fragmentation with a flat impact experimentally, focusing on the low impact energy region near the fragmentation-critical point. We found that the universality class of fragmentation transition…
We revisit the concept of marginal stability in glasses, and determine its range of applicability in the context of avalanche-type response to slow external driving. We argue that there is an intimate connection between a pseudo-gap in the…
We introduce a model for the dynamics of mud cracking in the limit of of extremely thin layers. In this model the growth of fracture proceeds by selecting the part of the material with the smallest (quenched) breaking threshold. In…
We consider a plate made from an isotropic but brittle elastic material, which is used to span a rigid aperture, across which a small pressure difference is applied. The problem we address is to find the structure which uses the least…