Related papers: Brittle to Quasi-Brittle Transition and Crack Init…
We address the question of why larger, high symmetry crystals are mostly weak, ductile and statistically sub-critical, while smaller crystals with the same symmetry are strong, brittle and super-critical. We link it to another question of…
Fracture processes in multi-phase solids are inherently complex due to multiple competing mechanisms. Here, we investigate the elastic and fracture behaviour of two-phase solids, comprising a fragile phase and a tough phase using a…
Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling…
Most monolithic brittle materials are vulnerable to the failure by cracks because of a lack of intrinsic toughening mechanisms, such as the plasticity in the vicinity of the crack front. As a result, most of the efforts to mitigate the…
Enhancing the mechanical properties of amorphous solids is crucial for material design, with microalloying being a common but not well-understood method. Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the effect of impurity…
This paper studies the competition of fracture initiation in the ductile soft phase and in the comparatively brittle hard phase in the microstructure of a two-phase material. A simple microstructural model is used to predict macroscopic…
Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale…
The main steps of the proof of the existence result for the quasi-static evolution of cracks in brittle materials, obtained in [7] in the vector case and for a general quasiconvex elastic energy, are presented here under the simplifying…
Materials failure in 3D still poses basic challenges. We study 3D brittle crack dynamics using a phase-field approach, where Gaussian quenched disorder in the fracture energy is incorporated. Disorder is characterized by a correlation…
Plasticity in soft amorphous materials typically involves collective deformation patterns that emerge upon intense shearing. The microscopic basis of amorphous plasticity has been commonly established through the notion of "Eshelby"-type…
We employ a recently developed model that allows the study of two-dimensional brittle crack propagation under fixed grip boundary conditions. The crack development highlights the importance of voids which appear ahead of the crack as…
This paper studies a two-phase material with a microstructure composed of a hard brittle reinforcement phase embedded in a soft ductile matrix. It addresses the full three-dimensional nature of the microstructure and macroscopic…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
Upon loading, amorphous solids can exhibit brittle yielding, with the abrupt formation of macroscopic shear bands leading to fracture, or ductile yielding, with a multitude of plastic events leading to homogeneous flow. It has been recently…
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…
We study how crack buckling affects stress and strain in a thin sheet with random disorder. The sheet is modeled as an elastic lattice of beams where each of the beams have individual thresholds for breaking. A statistical distribution with…
The mechanical yielding of amorphous solids under external loading can be broadly classified into ductile and brittle types, depending on whether their macroscopic stress response is smooth or abrupt, respectively. Recently, it has been…
Crack growth is the basic mechanism leading to the failure of brittle materials. Engineering addresses this problem within the framework of continuum mechanics, which links deterministically the crack motion to the applied loading. Such an…
Quantitative understanding of the fracture toughness of metallic glasses, including the associated ductile-to-brittle transitions, is not yet available. Here we use a simple model of plastic deformation in glasses, coupled to an advanced…
Ever since the very first human-made knapped tools, the control of fracture propagation in brittle materials has been a vector of technological development. Nowadays, a broad range of applications relies on crack propagation control, from…