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We investigate the shrinkage induced breakup of thin layers of heterogeneous materials attached to a substrate, a ubiquitous natural phenomenon with a wide range of potential applications. Focusing on the evolution of the fragment ensemble,…
Materials with network-like microstructure, including polymers, are the backbone for many natural and human-made materials such as gels, biological tissues, metamaterials, and rubbers. Fracture processes in these networked materials are…
The dynamics of a single crack moving through a heterogeneous medium is studied in the quasi-static approximation. Equations of motion for the crack front are formulated and the resulting scaling behaviour analyzed. In a model scalar system…
Brittle materials fail catastrophically. In consequence of their limited flaw-tolerance, failure occurs by localized fracture and is typically a dynamic process. Recently, experiments on epithelial cell monolayers have revealed that this…
Fractures are a critical process in how materials wear, weaken, and fail whose unpredictable behavior can have dire consequences. While the behavior of smooth cracks in ideal materials is well understood, it is assumed that for real,…
In spite of the apparent similarity of micro-branching instabilities in different brittle materials, we propose that the physics determining the typical length- and time-scales characterizing the post-instability patterns differ greatly…
Fundamental understanding of the effect of microscopic parameters on the dynamics of probe particles in different complex environments has wide implications. Examples include diffusion of proteins in the biological hydrogels, porous media,…
Changes in the mechanical properties of granular materials, induced by variations in the intrinsic compressibility of the particles, are investigated by means of numerical simulations based on the combination of the Finite Element and…
In this paper, the influence of aggregate size and volume fraction on shrinkage induced micro-cracking and permeability of concrete and mortar was investigated. Nonlinear finite element analyses of model concrete and mortar specimens with…
Hypothesis: Sample-spanning particle networks are used to induce structure and a yield stress, necessary for 3D printing of porous ceramics and paints. In capillary suspensions, a small quantity of immiscible secondary fluid is incorporated…
We consider two (2D) and three (3D) dimensional granular systems exposed to compression, and ask what is the influence of the number of physical dimensions on the properties of the interaction networks that spontaneously form as these…
In this paper, the influence of aggregate size and volume fraction on shrinkage induced micro-cracking and permeability of concrete and mortar was investigated. Nonlinear finite element analyses of model concrete and mortar specimens were…
We investigate wrinkling of two-dimensional random and triangular semiflexible polymer networks under shear. Both types of semiflexible networks exhibit wrinkling above a small critical shear angle, which scales with an exponent of the…
Bidisperse particle systems are common in both natural and engineered materials, and it is known to influence packing, flow, and stability. However, their direct effect on elastic properties, particularly in systems with attractive…
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…
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…
Numerical simulations of concrete fracture performed with a probabilistic mesoscale discrete model are presented. The model represents a substantial part of material randomness by assigning random locations to the largest aggregates. The…
Brittle solids are often toughened by adding a second-phase material. This practice often results in composites with material heterogeneities on the meso scale: large compared to the scale of the process zone but small compared to that of…
Wet granular materials in a quasi-static steady state shear flow have been studied with discrete particle simulations. Macroscopic quantities, consistent with the conservation laws of continuum theory, are obtained by time averaging and…
The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle's…