Related papers: Fatigue in disordered media
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…
This paper investigates hydraulic fracture in a media with periodic heterogeneous toughness. Results for the plane-strain (KGD) model are analysed. The energy distribution as the fracture propagates is examined, along with the evolution of…
Networks of interconnected materials permeate throughout nature, biology, and technology due to exceptional mechanical performance. Despite the importance of failure resistance in network design and utility, no existing physical model…
The focus of the article is on fracture criteria for dynamic crack propagation in elastic materials with microstructures. Steady-state propagation of a Mode III semi-infinite crack subject to loading applied on the crack surfaces is…
Considering diffusion in the presence of asymmetric disorder, an exact relationship between the strength of weak disorder and the electric resistance of the corresponding resistor network is revealed, which is valid in arbitrary networks.…
We study how crack buckling affects stress and strain in a thin sheet with random disorder. The sheet is modeled as an elastic lattice of beams where each of the beams have individual thresholds for breaking. A statistical distribution with…
Recently the scaling laws describing the roughness development of fracture surfaces was proposed to be related to the macroscopic elastic energy released during crack propagation [Mor00]. On this basis, an energy-based asymptotic analysis…
Fracture of highly stretched materials challenges our view of how things break. We directly visualize rupture of tough double-network (DN) gels at >50\% strain. During fracture, crack tip shapes obey a $x\sim y^{1.6}$ power-law, in contrast…
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…
Power law distributed fluctuations are known to accompany \emph{terminal} failure in disordered brittle solids. The associated intermittent scale-free behavior is of interest from the fundamental point of view as it emerges universally from…
A model based on the aspect of the distribution of the length of conduction paths accessible for electric charge flow reproduces the universal power-law dispersive ac conductivity observed in polymer networks and, generally, in disordered…
We study experimentally the slow growth of a single crack in a fibrous material and observe stepwise growth dynamics. We model the material as a lattice where the crack is pinned by elastic traps and grows due to thermally activated stress…
We present an extension of the continuous damage fiber bundle model to describe the gradual degradation of highly heterogeneous materials under an increasing external load. Breaking of a fiber in the model is preceded by a sequence of…
We present a model for the thermally activated propagation of cracks in elastic matrices. The propagation is considered as a subcritical phenomenon, the kinetics of which being described by an Arrhenius law. In this law, we take the thermal…
In a previous paper (Leblond et al., 2011), we proposed a theoretical interpretation of the experimentally well known instability of coplanar crack propagation in mode I+III. The interpretation relied on a stability analysis based on…
The effect of increasing structural disorder on the distribution of contact forces P(f), inside three dimensional particle assemblies is systematically studied using computer simulations of model granular packings. Starting from a…
We analyze a two-dimensional spring network model comprising breakable and unbreakable springs. Computer simulations showed this system to exhibit intermittent stress drops in a larger strain regime, and these stress drops resulted in…
The statistical properties of failure are studied in a fiber bundle model with thermal noise. We show that the macroscopic failure is produced by a thermal activation of microcracks. Most importantly the effective temperature of the system…
Fatigue failure occurs when a solid is subjected to repeated, cyclic loading. Glasses subjected to cyclic to shear deformation have recently been investigated using computer simulations and theoretical models, to characterize and…
The thesis consists of four main chapters. In Ch.2 we discuss experimental results concerning the scaling behavior and fractality of fracture surfaces. In Ch.3 continuum and discrete models for fracture mechanics are reviewed and partially…