Related papers: Tunable failure: control of rupture through rigidi…
Adding perforations to a continuum sheet allows new modes of deformation, and thus modifies its elastic behavior. The failure behavior of such a perforated sheet is explored, using a model experimental system: a material containing a…
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,…
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…
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving…
Conforming materials to rigid substrates with Gaussian curvature --- positive for spheres and negative for saddles --- has proven a versatile tool to guide the self-assembly of defects such as scars, pleats, folds, blisters, and liquid…
In ordinary solids, material disorder is known to increase the size of the process zone in which stress concentrates at the crack tip, causing a transition from localized to diffuse failure. Here, we report experiments on disordered 2D…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
Fracture limits the structural stability of macroscopic and microscopic materials, from beams and bones to microtubules and nanotubes. Despite recent progress, fracture control continues to present profound practical and theoretical…
The response of amorphous materials to an applied strain can be continuous, or instead display a macroscopic stress drop when a shear band nucleates. Such discontinuous response can be observed if the initial configuration is very stable.…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
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…
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…
Failure in disordered solids is accompanied by intermittent fluctuations extending over a broad range of scales. The implied scaling has been previously associated with either spinodal or critical points. We use an analytically transparent…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
Ductility quantifies a material's capacity for plastic deformation, and it is a key property for preventing fracture driven failure in engineering parts. While some brittle materials exhibit improved ductility at small scales, the processes…
The precise mechanisms underlying the failure of multi-phase materials may be strongly dependent on the material's microstructural morphology. Micromechanical modeling has provided much insight into this dependence, but uncertainties remain…
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 failure of adhesive bondlines has been studied at the microscopic level via tensile tests. Stable crack propagation could be generated by means of samples with improved geometry, which made in-situ observations possible. The interaction…
Quasi-static tensile experiments were performed for a model disordered solid consisting of a two-dimensional raft of polydisperse floating granular particles with capillary attractions. The ductility is tuned by controlling the capillary…
A bonded particle model is used to explore how variations in the material properties of brittle, isotropic solids affect critical behavior in fragmentation. To control material properties, a new model is proposed which includes breakable…