Related papers: Towards understanding the geometry effects on frac…
The failure of brittle solids involves, before macroscopic rupture, power-law distributed avalanches of local rupture events whereby microcracks nucleate and grow, which are also observed in for an elastic interface evolving in a…
We examine the atomistic scale dependence of material's resistance-to-failure by numerical simulations and analytical analysis in electrical analogs of brittle crystals. We show that fracture toughness depends on the lattice geometry in a…
The relation between fracture surface morphology and the three-dimensional structure of crack fronts is investigated through direct observation of brittle cracks in gels. A key notion in this investigation is the discontinuity of the crack…
Geologic shear fractures such as faults and slip surfaces involve marked friction along the discontinuities as they are subjected to significant confining pressures. This friction plays a critical role in the growth of these shear…
As a consequence of shearing, wing cracks can emerge from pre-existing fractures. The process involves the interaction of sliding of the existing fracture surfaces and the tensile material failure that creates wing cracks. This work devises…
When a hole is introduced into an elastic material, it will usually act to reduce the overall mechanical stiffness. A general ambition is to investigate whether a stiff shell around the hole can act to maintain the overall mechanical…
To provide insight into the basic properties of emerging structures when bacteria or other microorganisms conquer surfaces, it is crucial to analyze their growth behavior during the formation of thin films. In this regard, many theoretical…
We present a computational framework to explore the effect of microstructure and constituent properties upon the fracture toughness of fibre-reinforced polymer composites. To capture microscopic matrix cracking and fibre-matrix debonding,…
Crack advance from short or long pre-cracks is predicted by the progressive failure of a cohesive zone in a strain gradient, elasto-plastic solid. The presence of strain gradients leads to the existence of an elastic zone at the tip of a…
We consider a membrane both weakly and strongly adhering to a geometrically structured substrate. The interaction potential is assumed to be local, via the Deryagin approximation, and harmonic. Consequently, we can analytically describe a…
We present a molecular dynamics study of force patterns, tensile strength and crack formation in a cohesive granular model where the particles are subjected to swelling or shrinkage gradients. Non-uniform particle size change generates…
We solve numerically the equations of motion for the collapse of a shell of baryonic matter, made of galaxies and substructure of $ 10^{6} M_{\odot}- 10^{9} M_{\odot}$, falling into the central regions of a cluster of galaxies taking…
When brittle hydrogels fail, several mechanisms conspire to alter the state of stress near the tip of a crack, and it is challenging to identify which mechanism is dominant. In the fracture of brittle solids, a sufficient far-field stress…
We investigate theoretically the effects of elastic and plastic deformations on heterogeneous nucleation and nanowire formation. In the first case, the influence of the confinement of the critical nucleus between two parallel misfitting…
We investigate dynamic crack propagation and fragmentation with the phase-field fracture approach. The method was chosen for its ability to yield crack paths that are independent of the underlying mesh, thanks to the damage regularization…
We address in this review unified analysis of phase-field models for cohesive fracture. Aiming to regularize the Barenblatt (1959) cohesive zone model, all the discussed models are distinguished by three characteristic functions, i.e., the…
Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic…
We study the genesis and the selective propagation of complex crack networks induced by thermal shock or drying of brittle materials. We use a quasi-static gradient damage model to perform large scale numerical simulations showing that the…
The phase field approach to modeling fracture uses a diffuse damage field to represent a crack. This addresses the singularities that arise at the crack tip in computations with sharp interface models, mollifying some of the difficulties…
When fast cracks become unstable to microscopic branching (micro-branching), fracture no longer occurs in an effective 2D medium. We follow in-plane crack front dynamics via real-time measurements in brittle gels as micro-branching unfolds…