Related papers: Capillary fracture of soft gels
Crack initiation and propagation are fundamental problems in materials science, often leading to catastrophic failure. While fracture in elastic solids occurs instantaneously above a critical load, viscoelastic materials may sustain high…
As a consequence of shearing, wing cracks can emerge from pre-existing fractures. The process involves the interaction of sliding of the existing fracture surfaces and the tensile material failure that creates wing cracks. This work devises…
Various kinds of heterogeneity in solids including atomistic discreteness affect the fracture strength as well as the failure dynamics remarkably. Here we study the effects of an initial crack in a discrete model for fracture in…
The resistance to fracture of reversible biopolymer hydrogels is an important control factor of the cutting/slicing and eating characteristics of food gels. It is also critical for their utilization in tissue engineering, for which…
A continuum model of crack propagation is presented and discussed. We obtain steady state solutions with a self-consistently selected propagation velocity and shape of the crack, provided that elastodynamic and viscoelastic effects are…
We report a novel surface-tension driven instability observed for droplets spreading on a compliant substrate. When a droplet is released on the surface of an agar gel, it forms arms/cracks when the ratio of surface tension gradient to gel…
While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material…
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:…
Brain tissue is a heterogeneous material, constituted by a soft matrix filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The interactions between, and the complexity of each of these components are responsible for the non-linear rate-dependent behaviour…
Fracture networks are ubiquitous in nature, spanning scales from millimeter-sized cracks in botanical peels to hundred-kilometer-long lineae on planetary satellites. The propagation of a crack is a complex, nonlinear phenomenon governed by…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
These notes address the mechanics of propagating hydraulic fractures (HF). In the first part, we focus on how different physical mechanisms (dissipation in fluid and solid, fluid storage in fracture and its exchange with permeable rock,…
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…
Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…
During hydraulic fracturing, the injection of a pressurized fluid in a brittle elastic medium leads to the formation and growth of fluid-filled fractures. A disc-like or penny-shaped fracture grows radially from a point source during the…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a…
Most of the research concerting crack propagation in discrete media is concerned with specific types of external loading: displacements on the boundaries, or constant energy fluxes or feeding waves originating from infinity. In this paper…
We investigate propagating fronts in disordered media that belong to the universality class of wetting contact lines and planar tensile crack fronts. We derive from first principles their nonlinear equations of motion, using the generalized…
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…