Related papers: Slow crack propagation through a disordered medium…
Slow crack propagation in ductile, and in certain brittle materials, appears to take place via the nucleation of voids ahead of the crack tip due to plastic yields, followed by the coalescence of these voids. Post mortem analysis of the…
We study the influence of a dissipation process on diffusion dynamics triggered by fluctuations with long-range correlations. We make the assumption that the perturbation process involved is of the same kind as those recently studied…
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…
On microscopic and mesoscopic scales, plastic flow of crystals is characterized by large intrinsic fluctuations. Deformation by crystallographic slip occurs in a sequence of intermittent bursts ('slip avalanches') with power-law size…
The failure of the population of micro-junctions forming the frictional interface between two solids is central to fields ranging from biomechanics to seismology. This failure is mediated by the propagation along the interface of various…
Materials are often heterogeneous at various length scales, with variations in grain structure, defects, and composition which has a strong influence on the emergent macroscopic plastic behavior. In particular, heterogeneities lead to…
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…
Inhomogeneities in deposition may lead to formation of rough surfaces, whose height fluctuations can be probed directly by scanning microscopy, or indirectly by scattering. Analytical or numerical treatments of simple growth models suggest…
Straight cracks are observed in thin coatings under residual tensile stress, resulting into the classical network pattern observed in china crockery, old paintings or dry mud. Here, we present a novel fracture mechanism where delamination…
We study the roughness of a crack interface in a sheet of paper. We distinguish between slow (sub-critical) and fast crack growth regimes. We show that the fracture roughness is different in the two regimes using a new method based on a…
Environmental heterogeneity can drive genetic heterogeneity in expanding populations; mutant strains may emerge that trade overall growth rate for an improved ability to survive in patches that are hostile to the wild type. This…
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 consider the multiple scattering of a scalar wave in a disordered medium with a weak nonlinearity of Kerr type. The perturbation theory, developed to calculate the temporal autocorrelation function of scattered wave, fails at short…
We study the random walk of a particle in a compartmentalized environment, as realized in biological samples or solid state compounds. Each compartment is characterized by its length $L$ and the boundaries transmittance $T$. We identify two…
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,…
We report on a particle-based numerical study of sheared amorphous solids in the dense slow flow regime. In this framework, deformation and flow are accompanied by critical fluctuation patterns associated with the macroscopic plastic…
The propagation of an interfacial crack front through a weak plane of a transparent Plexiglas block has been studied experimentally. A stable crack in mode I was generated by loading the system by an imposed displacement. The local…
We employ a recently developed model that allows the study of two-dimensional brittle crack propagation under fixed grip boundary conditions. The crack development highlights the importance of voids which appear ahead of the crack as…
Analytical models have been developed for fracture propagation over the last several decades and are now considered with renewed interest; the range of their applicability varies for different materials and different loading conditions.…
Slip at a frictional interface occurs via intermittent events. Understanding how these events are nucleated, can propagate, or stop spontaneously remains a challenge, central to earthquake science and tribology. In the absence of disorder,…