Related papers: Topological defects govern crack front motion and …
Cracks develop various surface patterns as they propagate in three-dimensional (3D) materials. Facet formation in nominally tensile (mode-I) fracture emerge in the slow, non-inertial regime and oftentimes takes the form of surface steps. We…
A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We…
Material failure is mediated by the propagation of cracks, which in realistic 3D materials typically involve multiple coexisting fracture planes. Multiple fracture-plane interactions create poorly understood out-of-plane crack structures,…
Cracks in thin layers are influenced by what lies beneath them. From buried craters to crocodile skin, crack patterns are found over an enormous range of length scales. Regardless of absolute size, their substrates can dramatically…
When cracks form in a thin contracting layer, they sequentially break the layer into smaller and smaller pieces. A rectilinear crack pattern encodes information about the order of crack formation, as later cracks tend to intersect with…
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…
A phase field model of a crack front propagating in a three dimensional brittle material is used to study the fractographic patterns induced by the branching instability. The numerical results of this model give rise to crack surfaces that…
The fracture mechanics was widely employed to explain the crack propagation in the deposition produced by drying colloidal suspension. However, more complex than conventional fracture, those cracks periodically distribute and make up a…
When a crack interacts with material heterogeneities, its front distorts and adopts complex tortuous configurations that are reminiscent of the energy barriers encountered during crack propagation. As such, the study of crack front…
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…
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…
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of a crack front during the micro-instabilities taking place in heterogeneous materials between two successive equilibrium positions. We focus specifically on the spatio-temporal…
Crack fronts deform due to heterogeneities, and inspecting these deformations can reveal local variations of material properties, and help predict out of plane damage. Current models neglect the influence of a finite dissipation…
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…
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…
The propagation of an interfacial crack front through a weak plane of a transparent Plexiglas block has been studied experimentally. A stable crack in mode I was generated by loading the system by an imposed displacement. The local…
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,…
Crack front waves (FWs) are dynamic objects that propagate along moving crack fronts in 3D materials. We study FW dynamics in the framework of a 3D phase-field framework that features a rate-dependent fracture energy $\Gamma(v)$ ($v$ is the…
Unstable growth of cracks (rough crack surface and crack branching) in dynamic fracture has long been observed in various materials. Until now, there was no universally agreed upon explanation for these instabilities. Here, we demonstrate…
Soft fracture in highly deformable solids involves both geometric and constitutive nonlinearities, necessitating advanced theoretical and computational frameworks for its accurate understanding. Tensile fractures subjected to mixed-mode…