Related papers: Approach to failure in porous granular materials u…
The present paper describes a stochastic model of fracture, whose fragment size distribution can be calculated analytically as a power-law-like distribution. The model is basically cascade fracture, but incorporates the effect that each…
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:…
We report on systematic measurements of the distribution of normal forces exerted by granular material under uniaxial compression onto the interior surfaces of a confining vessel. Our experiments on three-dimensional, random packings of…
Creep rupture of heterogeneous materials occurring under constant sub-critical external loads is responsible for the collapse of engineering constructions and for natural catastrophes. Acoustic monitoring of crackling bursts provides…
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…
The fracture of materials is a catastrophic phenomenon of considerable technological and scientific importance. Here, we analysed experiments designed for industrial applications in order to test the concept that, in heterogeneous materials…
The failure of brittle solids involves, before macroscopic rupture, power-law distributed avalanches of local rupture events whereby microcracks nucleate and grow, which are also observed in for an elastic interface evolving in a…
If a porous media is being damaged by excessive stress, the elastic matrix at every infinitesimal volume separates into a 'solid' and a 'broken' component. The 'solid' part is the one that is capable of transferring stress, whereas the…
We study experimentally the slow growth of a single crack in a fibrous material and observe stepwise growth dynamics. We model the material as a lattice where the crack is pinned by elastic traps and grows due to thermally activated stress…
Granular materials -- aggregates of many discrete, disconnected solid particles -- are ubiquitous in natural and industrial settings. Predictive models for their behavior have wide ranging applications, e.g. in defense, mining,…
Dynamic crack propagation drives catastrophic solid failures. In many amorphous brittle materials, sufficiently fast crack growth involves small-scale, high-frequency microcracking damage localized near the crack tip. The ultra-fast…
We consider first a homogeneous fiber bundle model where all the fibers have got the same stress threshold beyond which all fail simultaneously in absence of noise. At finite noise, the bundle acquires a fatigue behavior due to the…
This paper presents a framework for modeling failure in quasi-brittle geomaterials under different loading conditions. A micromechanics-based model is proposed in which the field variables are linked to physical mechanisms at the microcrack…
Fracture processes in heterogeneous materials comprise a large number of disordered spatial degrees of freedom, representing the dynamical state of a sample over the entire domain of interest. This complexity is usually modeled directly,…
In order to understand the nature of friction in closely-packed granular materials, a discrete element simulation on granular layers subjected to isobaric plain shear is performed. It is found that the friction coefficient increases as the…
Guided by recent advances in the understanding of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastic brittle materials, this paper proposes a suite of three simple experiments that permit the measurement of the three macroscopic material…
Catastrophic failures have momentous impact in many scientific and technological fields but remain challenging to understand and predict. One key difficulty lies in the burstiness of rupture phenomena, which typically involve a series of…
The dynamic collapse of pores under shock loading is thought to be directly related to hot spot generation and material failure, which is critical to the performance of porous energetic and structural materials. However, the shock…
The dynamic fragmentation of residually stressed solids involves a complex interplay between stored elastic energy, stress wave propagation, and crack instabilities. In this work, we investigate the fracture mechanics of chemically…
Motivated by recent experiments studying the creep and breakup of a protein gel under stress, we introduce a simple mesoscopic model for the irreversible failure of gels and fibrous materials, and demonstrate it to capture much of the…