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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…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
Soft yet tough materials are ubiquitous in nature and everyday life. The ratio between fracture toughness and intrinsic fracture energy of a soft material defines its toughness enhancement. Soft materials' toughness enhancement has been…
Over the past seven years, full-field analyses of a wide range of classical as well as modern quasi-static fracture experiments on nominally elastic brittle materials -- ranging from hard ceramics to soft elastomers -- have repeatedly…
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…
Cutting soft materials is a complex process governed by the interplay of bulk large deformation, interfacial soft fracture, and contact forces with the cutting tool. Existing experimental characterizations and numerical models often fail to…
We propose a continuum theory to model the Mullins effect, which is ubiquitously observed in polymer composites. In the theory, the softening of the materials during the stretching process is accounted for by considering the delamination of…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
While crack nucleation and propagation in the brittle or quasi-brittle regime can be predicted via variational or material-force-based phase field fracture models, these models often assume that the underlying elastic response of the…
Design of large composite structures requires understanding the scaling of their mechanical properties, an aspect often overlooked in the literature on composites. This contribution analyzes, experimentally and numerically, the…
Over the last half-century, linear viscoelastic models for crack growth in soft solids have flourished but their predictions have rarely been compared to experiments. In fact, most available models are either very approximate or cast in…
We investigate the role of microstructural bridging on the fracture toughness of composite materials. To achieve this, a new computational framework is presented that integrates phase field fracture and cohesive zone models to simulate…
Reproducing the key features of fracture behavior under multiaxial stress states is essential for accurate modeling. Experimental evidence indicates that three intrinsic material properties govern fracture nucleation in elastic materials:…
We derive an effective membrane theory in the thin film limit within a two phase material model for a specimen consisting of an elastic matrix and soft inclusions. The soft inclusions may lead to the formation of cracks within the elastic…
This paper presents a comprehensive computational framework for investigating thermo-elastic fracture in transversely isotropic materials, where classical linear elasticity fails to predict physically realistic behavior near stress…
Due to its computational robustness and versatility, the phase field fracture model has become the preferred tool for predicting a wide range of cracking phenomena. However, in its conventional form, its intrinsic tension-compression…
This study presents a novel physics informed, data-driven modeling framework for capturing the strongly nonlinear thermo-viscoelastic behavior of soft materials exhibiting stress softening, with emphasis on the Mullins effect. Unlike…
Cutting mechanics in soft solids have been a subject of study for several decades, an interest fuelled by the multitude of its applications, including material testing, manufacturing, and biomedical technology. Wire cutting is the simplest…
Fracture toughness $K_{IC}$ plays an important role in materials design. Along with numerous experimental methods to measure fracture toughness of materials, its understanding and theoretical prediction is very important. However,…
Many new soft but tough rubbery materials have been recently discovered and new applications such as flexible prosthetics, stretchable electrodes or soft robotics continuously emerge. Yet, a credible multi-scale quantitative picture of…