Related papers: A Recipe for Composite Materials: An Approach thro…

Materials with network-like microstructure, including polymers, are the backbone for many natural and human-made materials such as gels, biological tissues, metamaterials, and rubbers. Fracture processes in these networked materials are…

Fracture mechanics is crucial for many fields of engineering, as precisely predicting failure of structures and parts is required for efficient designs. The simulation of failure processes is, from a mechanical and a numerical point of…

A bundle of fibers has been considered here as a model for composite materials, where breaking of the fibers occur due to a combined influence of applied load (stress) and external noise. Through numerical simulation and a mean-field…

Polymer composite materials are widely used for their exceptional mechanical properties, notably their ability to resist large deformations. Here we examine the failure stress and strain of rubbers reinforced by varying amounts of…

This is the first of a series of three articles that treats fracture localization as a critical phenomenon. This first article establishes a statistical mechanics based on ensemble averages when fluctuations through time play no role in…

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…

We introduce a model of fracture which includes the out-of-plane degrees of freedom necessary to describe buckling in a thin-sheet material. The model is a regular square lattice of elastic beams, rigidly connected at the nodes so as to…

We study the fatigue fracture of disordered materials by means of computer simulations of a discrete element model. We extend a two-dimensional fracture model to capture the microscopic mechanisms relevant for fatigue, and we simulate the…

Heterogeneous materials are often organized in a hierarchical manner, where a basic unit is repeated over multiple scales.The structure then acquires a self-similar pattern. Examples of such structure are found in various biological and…

Tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations shed light into the fracture mechanisms and the ideal strength of tetrahedral amorphous carbon and of nanocomposite carbon containing diamond crystallites, two of the hardest materials. It is…

Multi-phase materials are key for modern engineering applications. They are generally characterized by a high strength and ductility. Many of these materials fail by ductile fracture of the, generally softer, matrix phase. In this work we…

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 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…

The computational analysis of fiber network fracture is an emerging field with application to paper, rubber-like materials, hydrogels, soft biological tissue, and composites. Fiber networks are often described as probabilistic structures of…

We investigate how the macroscopic response and the size scaling of the ultimate strength of materials change when their local strength is sampled from a fat-tailed distribution and the degree of disorder is varied in a broad range. Using…

Multi-phase materials, such as composite materials, exhibit multiple competing failure mechanisms during the growth of a macroscopic defect. For the simulation of the overall fracture process in such materials, we develop a two-phase spring…

Progressive damage, which eventually leads to failure, is ubiquitous in biological and synthetic polymers. The simplest case to consider is that of elastomeric materials, which can undergo large reversible deformations with negligible rate…

A phase-field approach is proposed for interface failure between two possibly dissimilar materials. The discrete adhesive interface is regularised over a finite width. Due to the use of a regularised crack model for the bulk material, an…

Mathematical models and computer algorithms are developed to calculate dynamic stress concentration and fracture wave propagation in a reinforced composite sheet. The composite consists of a regular system alternating extensible fibers and…

Bundles of many fibers, with statistically distributed thresholds for breakdown of individual fibers and where the load carried by a bursting fiber is equally distributed among the surviving members, are considered. During the breakdown…