Related papers: Capillary fracture of soft gels
A droplet of surfactant spreading on an ultrasoft ($E \lesssim 100$ Pa) gel substrate will produce capillary fractures at the gel surface; these fractures originate at the contact-line and propagate outwards in a starburst pattern. There is…
The nucleation and propagation of hydrofractures by injection of over pressured fluids in an elastic and isotropic medium are studied experimentally. Non-Newtonian fluids are injected inside a gelatine whose mechanical properties are…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
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…
Direct observations of the surface and shape of model nano-colloidal gels associated with measurements of the spatial distribution of water content during drying show that air starts to significantly penetrate the sample when the material…
Fracture processes are ubiquitous in soft materials, even in complex fluids, subjected to stresses. To investigate these processes in a simple geometry, we use a model self-assembled transient gel and study the instability patterns obtained…
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…
Propagation of a fluid-driven crack in an impermeable linear elastic medium under axis-symmetric conditions is investigated in the present work. The fluid exerting the pressure inside the crack is an incompressible Newtonian one and its…
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,…
We have carried out systematic fracture experiments in a single edge notch geometry over a range of stretch rates on dual crosslink hydrogels made from polyvinyl alcohol chains chemically crosslinked with glutaraldehyde and physically…
Experiments on quasistatic crack propagation in gelatin hydrogels reveal a new branching instability triggered by wetting the tip opening with a drop of aqueous solvent less viscous than the bulk one. We show that the emergence of unstable…
In fractured poroelastic media under high differential stress, the shearing of fractures and faults and the corresponding propagation of wing cracks can be induced by fluid injection. Focusing on low-pressure stimulation with fluid…
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…
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…
In our previous paper (Eur. Phys. J. E 4, 121 (2001)) we proposed a coarse-grained elastic energy for nacre, or stratified structure of hard and soft layers. We then analyzed a crack running perpendicular to the layers and suggested one…
Crack initiation and propagation in elastic - perfectly plastic bodies is studied in a phase-field or variational gradient damage formulation. A rate-independent formulation that naturally couples elasticity, perfect plasticity and fracture…
We study the interaction of small hydrophobic particles on the surface of an ultra-soft elastic gel, in which a small amount of elasticity of the medium balances the weights of the particles. The excess energy of the surface of the deformed…
Magma-driven fractures are the main mechanism for magma emplacement in the crust. A fundamental question is how the released fluid controls the propagation dynamics and fracture geometry (depth and breadth) in three dimensions. Analog…
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…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…