Related papers: Poroelastic toughening in polymer gels: A theoreti…
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…
Polymer gels behave as soft viscoelastic solids and exhibit a generic nonlinear mechanical response characterized by pronounced stiffening prior to irreversible failure, most often through macroscopic fractures. Here, we aim at capturing…
We present an extensive experimental study of mode-I, steady, slow crack dynamics in gelatin gels. Taking advantage of the sensitivity of the elastic stiffness to gel composition and history we confirm and extend the model for fracture of…
This study investigated, experimentally and numerically, the fracturing behavior of thermoset polymer structures featuring cracks and sharp u-notches. It is shown that, even for cases in which the sharpness of the notch would suggest…
We study experimentally the fracture mechanisms of a model cohesive granular medium consisting of glass beads held together by solidified polymer bridges. The elastic response of this material can be controlled by changing the cross-linking…
Theoretical analyses and experiments have been carried out to investigate fracture behavior of glassy polymers. Our birefringence measurements quantify the local stress buildup at cut tip during different stages of drawing. Based on…
Strong particulate gels are widely believed to behave poroelastically in compression, e.g. in sedimentation, even though they consolidate irreversibly because of the stickiness of the particles. Particulate gels are usually adhesive as well…
Understanding fluctuation-induced breakages in polymers has important implications for basic and applied sciences. Here I present for the first time an analytical treatment of the thermal breakage problem of a semi-flexible polymer model…
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…
In fracture mechanics, polyacrylamide hydrogels have been widely used as a model material for experiments, benefited from its optical transparency, fracture brittleness, and low Rayleigh wave velocity. To describe the brittle fracture in…
We study the dependence of the fracture surface energy on the pulling velocity for nano-porous polypropylene (PP) sheets to find two components: the static and dynamic ones. We show that these terms can be interpreted respectively as…
In this paper we demonstrate the influence of the pore pressure to the development of a hydraulically-driven fracture in a poroelastic medium. We present a novel numerical model for propagation of a planar hydraulic fracture and prove its…
We combine molecular dynamics simulations of deformations at the submicron scale with a continuum fracture mechanics calculation for the onset of crack propagation to predict the macroscopic fracture toughness of amorphous glassy polymers.…
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…
Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
Tough adhesive hydrogels find broad applications in engineering and medicine. Such hydrogels feature high resistance against both cohesion and adhesion failure. The superior fracture properties may, however, deteriorate when the hydrogels…
The resistance to fracture of reversible biopolymer hydrogels is an important control factor of the cutting/slicing and eating characteristics of food gels. It is also critical for their utilization in tissue engineering, for which…
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…
We propose a novel phase-field model to predict elastic microphase separation in polymer gels. To this end, we extend the Cahn-Hilliard free-energy functional to incorporate an elastic strain energy and a coupling term. These contributions…
This paper investigates the effects of plasticity on the effective fracture toughness. A layered material is considered as a modelling system. An elastic-plastic phase-field model and a surfing boundary condition are used to study how the…