Related papers: Fracture of dual crosslink gels with permanent and…
To clarify effects of crack speed and cross-link density on fracture energy of acrylamide gels, we evaluated the roughness of the fracture surface and measured the fracture energy taking into account the roughness. The fracture energy…
Fracture of highly stretched materials challenges our view of how things break. We directly visualize rupture of tough double-network (DN) gels at >50\% strain. During fracture, crack tip shapes obey a $x\sim y^{1.6}$ power-law, in contrast…
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…
A liquid droplet resting on a soft gel substrate can deform that substrate to the point of material failure, whereby fractures develop on the gel surface that propagate outwards from the contact-line in a starburst pattern. In this paper,…
We investigate crack propagation in a simple two-dimensional visco-elastic model and find a scaling regime in the relation between the propagation velocity and energy release rate or fracture energy, together with lower and upper bounds of…
We report on rate-dependent fracture energy measurements over three decades of steady crack velocities in alginate and gelatin hydrogels. We evidence that, irrespective of gel thermo-reversibility, thermally activated "unzipping" of the…
Recently, the phase field method has been increasingly used for brittle fractures in soft materials like polymers, elastomers, and biological tissues. When considering finite deformations to account for the highly deformable nature of soft…
We investigate dynamic fracture of heterogeneous materials experimentally by measuring displacement fields as a rupture propagates through a periodic array of obstacles of controlled fracture energy. Our measurements demonstrate the…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…
In earlier papers (Leblond et.al., 2011, 2019), we presented linear stability analyses of the coplanar propagation of a crack loaded in mixed-mode I+III, based on a "double'' propagation criterion combining Griffith (1920)'s energetic…
The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical…
During brittle crack propagation, a smooth crack front curve frequently becomes disjoint, generating a stepped crack and a material ligament that unites the newly formed crack fronts. These universal features fundamentally alter the…
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…
We have studied the propagation of a crack front along the heterogeneous weak plane of a transparent poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) block using two different loading conditions: imposed constant velocity and creep relaxation. We have…
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.…
Dynamic fracture in a wide class of materials reveals "fracture energy" $\Gamma$ much larger than the expected nominal surface energy due to the formation of two fresh surfaces. Moreover, the fracture energy depends on the crack velocity,…
The focus of the article is on fracture criteria for dynamic crack propagation in elastic materials with microstructures. Steady-state propagation of a Mode III semi-infinite crack subject to loading applied on the crack surfaces is…
Griffith's energetic criterion, or `energy balance', has for a century formed the basis for fracture mechanics; the energy flowing into a crack front is precisely balanced by the dissipation (fracture energy) at the front. If the crack…
Most of the research concerting crack propagation in discrete media is concerned with specific types of external loading: displacements on the boundaries, or constant energy fluxes or feeding waves originating from infinity. In this paper…
In this paper we first obtain the order of stress singularity for a dynamically propagating self-affine fractal crack. We then show that there is always an upper bound to roughness, i.e. a propagating fractal crack reaches a terminal…