Related papers: From microstructural features to effective toughne…
Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling…
In earlier papers (Leblond et.al., 2011, 2019), we presented linear stability analyses of the coplanar propagation of a crack loaded in mixed-mode I+III, based on a "double'' propagation criterion combining Griffith (1920)'s energetic…
This paper is concerned with the problem of a semi-infinite crack steadily propagating in an elastic solid with microstructures subject to antiplane loading applied on the crack surfaces. The loading is moving with the same constant…
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…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…
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…
Brittle materials fail catastrophically. In consequence of their limited flaw-tolerance, failure occurs by localized fracture and is typically a dynamic process. Recently, experiments on epithelial cell monolayers have revealed that this…
Micron-scale single crystalline materials deform plastically via large intermittent strain bursts that make the deformation process unpredictable. Here we investigate this stochastic phenomenon by analysing the plastic response of an…
This paper presents a formulation for brittle fracture in 3D elastic solids within the context of configurational mechanics. The local form of the first law of thermodynamics provides a condition for equilibrium of the crack front. The…
Fractures are a critical process in how materials wear, weaken, and fail whose unpredictable behavior can have dire consequences. While the behavior of smooth cracks in ideal materials is well understood, it is assumed that for real,…
Predicting the growth of large cracks in brittle materials is a fundamental unresolved problem in fracture mechanics. Under out-of-plane shear loading, an initially planar crack may fragment into multiple cracks, forming an echelon crack…
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…
We investigate crack propagation in a simple two-dimensional visco-elastic model and find a scaling regime in the relation between the propagation velocity and energy release rate or fracture energy, together with lower and upper bounds of…
Mechanical metamaterials can be designed to exhibit unique mechanical properties, including tunable auxetic behavior as well as multi-stability, which arise from the geometry and configuration of the constituent building blocks.…
While we fundamentally understand the dynamics of 'simple' cracks propagating in brittle solids within perfect (homogeneous) materials, we do not understand how paths of moving cracks are determined. We experimentally study strongly…
The dynamics of a single crack moving through a heterogeneous medium is studied in the quasi-static approximation. Equations of motion for the crack front are formulated and the resulting scaling behaviour analyzed. In a model scalar system…
The propagation of a 3D crack in an heterogeneous material is studied using a phase field model. It is shown that in the case of randomly distributed inclusions of soft material in a matrix, the nature of the distribution has little effect…
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…
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…
While cracking is a complex dynamics that involves material intrinsic properties like grain shape and size distribution, elastic properties of grain and cementing materials, and extrinsic properties of loading, in this work, the focus has…