Related papers: Fiber networks below the isostatic point: fracture…
Optimal paths play a fundamental role in numerous physical applications ranging from random polymers to brittle fracture, from the flow through porous media to information propagation. Here for the first time we explore the path that is…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
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…
The response of amorphous materials to an applied strain can be continuous, or instead display a macroscopic stress drop when a shear band nucleates. Such discontinuous response can be observed if the initial configuration is very stable.…
Various kinds of heterogeneity in solids including atomistic discreteness affect the fracture strength as well as the failure dynamics remarkably. Here we study the effects of an initial crack in a discrete model for fracture in…
A phase diagram for a one-dimensional fiber bundle model is constructed with a continuous variation in two parameters guiding the dynamics of the model: strength of disorder and range of stress relaxation. When the range of stress…
By performing extensive simulations with unprecedentedly large system sizes, we unveil how rigidity influences the fracture of disordered materials. We observe the largest damage in networks with connectivity close to the isostatic point…
Fracture toughness is the material property characterizing resistance to failure. Predicting its value from the solid structure at the atomistic scale remains elusive, even in the simplest situations of brittle fracture. We report here…
The correlations among elements that break in random fuse network fracture are studied, for disorder strong enough to allow for volume damage before final failure. The growth of microfractures is found to be uncorrelated above a…
The two-dimensional oscillatory crack instability, experimentally observed in a class of brittle materials under strongly dynamic conditions, has been recently reproduced by a nonlinear phase-field fracture theory. Here we highlight the…
The failure time of samples of heterogeneous materials (wood, fiberglass) is studied as a function of the applied stress. It is shown that in these materials the failure time is predicted with a good accuracy by a model of microcrack…
In this paper, we'll answer several abstract, formal questions about the nature of crack growth and nucleation. Bringing a field theory point of view to fracture illuminates things in what I hope will be an entertaining way. Formally, what…
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
We present a unified theory of fracture in disordered brittle media that reconciles apparently conflicting results reported in the literature. Our renormalization group based approach yields a phase diagram in which the percolation fixed…
Fracture is a fundamental mechanism of materials failure. Propagating cracks can exhibit a rich dynamical behavior controlled by a subtle interplay between microscopic failure processes in the crack tip region and macroscopic elasticity. We…
We investigate the role of architected thin films in the interfacial failure properties of bi-layer composites. Our results show that, while graded structures can be used to prescribe failure at the interface, they do not offer significant…
Dynamic Mode III interfacial fracture in a dissimilar square-cell lattice, composed of two contrasting mass-spring lattice half-planes joined at an interface, is considered. The fracture, driven by a remotely applied load, is assumed to…
The failure of materials and interfaces is mediated by cracks, nearly singular dissipative structures that propagate at velocities approaching the speed of sound. Crack initiation and subsequent propagation -- the dynamic process of…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
The fracture strength distribution of materials is often described in terms of the Weibull law which can be derived by using extreme value statistics if elastic interactions are ignored. Here, we consider explicitly the interplay between…