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Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
Recent theoretical and computational progress has led to unprecedented understanding of symmetry-breaking instabilities in 2D dynamic fracture. At the heart of this progress resides the identification of two intrinsic, near crack tip length…
Cracks in soft materials exhibit diverse dynamic patterns, involving straight, oscillation, branching, and supershear fracture. Here, we successfully reproduce these crack morphologies in a two-dimensional pre-strained fracture scenario and…
The stability of a rapid dynamic crack in a two dimensional infinite strip is studied in the framework of Linear Elasticity Fracture Mechanics supplemented with a modified principle of local symmetry. It is predicted that a single crack…
A dynamic crack tip equation of motion is proposed based on the autonomy of the near-tip nonlinear zone of scale $\ell_{nl}$, symmetry principles, causality and scaling arguments. Causality implies that the asymptotic linear-elastic fields…
Experiments of pure tensile fracture in brittle gels reveal a new dynamic oscillatory instability whose onset occurs at a critical velocity, Vc = 0.87 Cs, where Cs is the shear wave speed. Until Vc crack dynamics are well described by…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
The failure of materials and interfaces is mediated by cracks, nearly singular dissipative structures that propagate at velocities approaching the speed of sound. Crack initiation and subsequent propagation -- the dynamic process of…
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…
In order to study the stability of mode-I fracture, we consider a crack moving along the centerline of a very wide strip and compute its steady-state response to a small, spatially periodic shear stress. We find that, in the presence of…
A dynamic crack will travel in a straight path up to a material-dependent critical speed beyond which its path becomes erratic. Predicting this critical speed and discovering the origin of this instability are two outstanding problems in…
This paper demonstrates that rapid fracture of ideal brittle lattices naturally involves phenomena long seen in experiment, but which have been hard to understand from a continuum point of view. These idealized models do not mimic realistic…
When fast cracks become unstable to microscopic branching (micro-branching), fracture no longer occurs in an effective 2D medium. We follow in-plane crack front dynamics via real-time measurements in brittle gels as micro-branching unfolds…
Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale…
We examine theoretically and numerically fast propagation of a tensile crack along unidimensional strips with periodically evolving toughness. In such dynamic fracture regimes, crack front waves form and transport front disturbances along…
Unstable growth of cracks (rough crack surface and crack branching) in dynamic fracture has long been observed in various materials. Until now, there was no universally agreed upon explanation for these instabilities. Here, we demonstrate…
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of a crack front during the micro-instabilities taking place in heterogeneous materials between two successive equilibrium positions. We focus specifically on the spatio-temporal…
Through controlled numerical simulations in a one dimensional fiber bundle model with local stress concentration, we established an inverse correlation between the strength of the material and the cracks which grow inside it - both the…
We studied the low speed fracture regime (0.1mm/s - 1nm/s) in different glassy materials (soda-lime glass, glass-ceramics) with variable but controlled length scale of heterogeneity. The chosen mechanical system enabled us to work in pure…
Experiments on quasistatic crack propagation in gelatin hydrogels reveal a new branching instability triggered by wetting the tip opening with a drop of aqueous solvent less viscous than the bulk one. We show that the emergence of unstable…