Related papers: Understanding fast macroscale fracture from microc…
Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) provides a consistent framework to evaluate quantitatively the energy flux released to the tip of a growing crack. Still, the way in which the crack selects its velocity in response to this energy…
Brittle fracturing of materials is common in natural and industrial processes over a variety of length scales. Knowledge of individual particle dynamics is vital to obtain deeper insight into the atomistic processes governing crack…
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…
Ever since the very first human-made knapped tools, the control of fracture propagation in brittle materials has been a vector of technological development. Nowadays, a broad range of applications relies on crack propagation control, from…
While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material…
Crack growth is the basic mechanism leading to the failure of brittle materials. Engineering addresses this problem within the framework of continuum mechanics, which links deterministically the crack motion to the applied loading. Such an…
Dynamic fracture experiments were performed in PMMA over a wide range of velocities and reveal that the fracture energy exhibits an abrupt 3-folds increase from its value at crack initiation at a well-defined critical velocity, below the…
The growth dynamics of a single crack in a heterogeneous material under subcritical loading is an intermittent process; and many features of this dynamics have been shown to agree with simple models of thermally activated rupture. In order…
The growth of cracks combines materials science, fracture mechanics, and statistical physics. The importance of fluctuations in the crack velocity is fundamental since it signals that the crack overcomes local barriers such as tough spots…
Brittle fractures of inhomogeneous materials like rocks, concrete, or ceramics are of two types: Nominally brittle and driven by the propagation of a single dominant crack or quasi-brittle and resulting from the accumulation of many…
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…
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…
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…
We have studied the propagation of a crack front along the heterogeneous weak plane of a transparent poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) block using two different loading conditions: imposed constant velocity and creep relaxation. We have…
Highly-deformable materials, from synthetic hydrogels to biological tissues, are becoming increasingly important from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Their mechanical behaviors, in particular the dynamics of crack propagation…
Statistics and thermally activated dynamics of crack nucleation and propagation in a two-dimensional heterogeneous material containing quenched randomly distributed defects are studied theoretically. Using the generalized Griffith criterion…
Spontaneous brittle fracture is studied based on the recently introduced model (Mishuris and Slepyan, Brittle fracture in a periodic structure with internal potential energy. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, in press). A periodic structure is considered,…
Fracture is a fundamental mechanism of materials failure. Propagating cracks can exhibit a rich dynamical behavior controlled by a subtle interplay between microscopic failure processes in the crack tip region and macroscopic elasticity. We…
We present a subcritical fracture growth model, coupled with the elastic redistribution of the acting mechanical stress along rugous rupture fronts. We show the ability of this model to quantitatively reproduce the intermittent dynamics of…
The strength of quasi-brittle materials depends on the ensemble of defects inside the sample and on the way damage accumulates before failure. Using large scale numerical simulations of the random fuse model, we investigate the evolution of…