Related papers: Evolving fracture patterns: columnar joints, mud c…
Disclinations, first observed in mesomorphic phases, are relevant to a number of ill-ordered condensed matter media, with continuous symmetries or frustrated order. They also appear in polycrystals at the edges of grain boundaries. They are…
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…
A model which accounts for cracking avalanches in piles of grains subject to external load is introduced and numerically simulated. The stress is stochastically transferred from higher layers to lower ones. Cracked areas exhibit various…
The shape of a crack front propagating through a thin sample is studied using a phase field model. The model is shown to have a well defined sharp interface limit. The crack front is found to be an ellipse with large axis the width of the…
The formation of three-dimensional prismatic cracks in the drying process of starch-water mixtures is investigated numerically. We assume that the mixture is an elastic porous medium which possesses a stress field and a water content field.…
Crack front waves are localized waves that propagate along the leading edge of a crack. They are generated by the interaction of a crack with a localized material inhomogeneity. We show that front waves are nonlinear entities that transport…
We investigate the shrinkage induced breakup of thin layers of heterogeneous materials attached to a substrate, a ubiquitous natural phenomenon with a wide range of potential applications. Focusing on the evolution of the fragment ensemble,…
Fractal surfaces ('patchwork quilts') are shown to arise under most general circumstances involving simple bitwise operations between real numbers. A theory is presented for all deterministic bitwise operations on a finite alphabet. It is…
Using an elastostatic description of crack growth based on the Griffith criterion and the principle of local symmetry, we present a stochastic model describing the propagation of a crack tip in a 2D heterogeneous brittle material. The model…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
The problem of crack pattern formation due to thermal shock loading at the surface of half-space is solved numerically using two-dimensional boundary element method. The results of numerical simulations with 100-200 random simultaneously…
Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored…
We investigate dynamic crack propagation and fragmentation with the phase-field fracture approach. The method was chosen for its ability to yield crack paths that are independent of the underlying mesh, thanks to the damage regularization…
Statistical models are essential to get a better understanding of the role of disorder in brittle disordered solids. Fiber bundle models play a special role as a paradigm, with a very good balance of simplicity and non-trivial effects. We…
The boundaries of central place models proved to be fractal lines, which compose fractal texture of central place networks. A textural fractal can be employed to explain the scale-free property of regional boundaries such as border lines,…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
We investigate the nucleation and propagation of cracks in self-assembled viscoelastic fluids, which are made of surfactant micelles reversibly linked by telechelic polymers. The morphology of the micelles can be continuously tuned, from…
While crack nucleation and propagation in the brittle or quasi-brittle regime can be predicted via variational or material-force-based phase field fracture models, these models often assume that the underlying elastic response of the…
Resurfacing a moderately deteriorated Portland cement concrete (PCC) pavement with asphalt concrete (AC) layers is considered an efficient rehabilitation practice. However, reflective cracks may develop shortly after resurfacing because of…
We introduce a phase-field method for continuous modeling of cracks with frictional contacts. Compared with standard discrete methods for frictional contacts, the phase-field method has two attractive features: (1) it can represent…