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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…
Under compressive creep, visco-plastic solids experiencing internal mass transfer processes have been recently proposed to accommodate singular cnoidal wave solutions, as material instabilities at the stationary wave limit. These…
Fracture in a disordered lattice system is studied. In our system, particles are initially arranged on the triangular lattice and each nearest-neighbor pair is connected with a randomly chosen soft or hard Hookean spring. Every spring has…
Strain localization is an instability phenomenon occurring in deformable solid materials which undergo dissipative deformation mechanisms. Such instability is characterized by the localization of the displacement or velocity fields in a…
Mechanical stresses are increasingly found to be associated with various biological functionalities. At the same time, topological defects are being identified across a diverse range of biological systems and are points of localized…
Using a geometric formalism of elasticity theory we develop a systematic theoretical method for controlling and manipulating the mechanical response of slender solids to external loads. We formally express global mechanical properties…
Stress paths in granular matter often suffer sudden large-scale rearrangements when the system is slightly perturbed, i.e. granular systems are unstable. We show in this paper that the observed instability is due to the minimally rigid, or…
Solids subjected to repeated cycles of stress or deformation can fail after several cycles, a phenomenon termed fatigue failure. Although intensely investigated for a wide range of materials owing to its obvious practical importance, a…
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…
A fiber bundle model in $(1+1)$-dimensions for the breaking of fibrous composite matrix is introduced. The model consists of $N$ parallel fibers fixed in two plates. When one of the plates is pulled in the direction parallel to the fibers,…
Materials that behave like machines, e.g. functional materials that are able to change shape in response to external stimuli (Bhattacharya and James, 2005), often do so by exploiting phase transitions. Shape memory materials and the tail…
This paper presents a class of 3D single-scale isotropic materials with tunable stiffness and buckling strength obtained via topology optimization and subsequent shape optimization. Compared to stiffness-optimal closed-cell plate material,…
The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…
A free material surface which supports surface diffusion becomes unstable when put under external non-hydrostatic stress. Since the chemical potential on a stressed surface is larger inside an indentation, small shape fluctuations develop…
The deformation of brittle material is primarily accompanied by micro-cracking and faulting. However, it has often been found that continuum fluid models, usually based on a non-Newtonian viscosity, are applicable. To explain this rheology,…
Quasi-brittle materials endowed with (statistically) self-similar hierarcical microstructures show distinct failure patterns that deviate from the standard scenario of damage accumulation followed by crack nucleation-and-growth. Here we…
Impacted with sufficiently large stress, a dense, initially liquid-like suspension can be forced into a solid-like state through the process of shear jamming. While the onset of shear jamming has been investigated extensively, less is known…
In this letter, structural rigidity concepts are used to understand the origin of instabilities in granular aggregates. It is shown that: a) The contact network of a noncohesive granular aggregate becomes exactly isostatic in the limit of…
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.…
Ductile damage models and cohesive laws incorporate the material plasticity entailing the growth of irrecoverable deformations even after complete failure. This unrealistic growth remains concealed until the unilateral effects arising from…