Related papers: Anti-fatigue-fracture hydrogels
Entanglement of polymer chains is ubiquitous in elastomers, gels, and biological tissues. While the effects of chain entanglement on elasticity and viscoelasticity of polymer networks have been intensively studied, it remains elusive how…
It is widely known that hydrogels, a class of soft materials made of a polymer chain network, are prone to fatigue failure. To understand the underlying mechanism, here we simulate polymer scission and fatigue initiation in the vicinity of…
In studies of the dynamic failure of brittle hydrogels, a bound has been placed on the process zone scale - the scale where material separation and ultimate failure occur. For the polyacrylamide hydrogel system under study, this bound is…
A new model is presented to predict hydrogen-assisted fatigue. The model combines a phase field description of fracture and fatigue, stress-assisted hydrogen diffusion, and a toughness degradation formulation with cyclic and hydrogen…
Tough adhesive hydrogels find broad applications in engineering and medicine. Such hydrogels feature high resistance against both cohesion and adhesion failure. The superior fracture properties may, however, deteriorate when the hydrogels…
Fatigue fracture is one of the main causes of failure in structures. However, the simulation of fatigue crack growth is computationally demanding due to the large number of load cycles involved. Metals in the low cycle fatigue range often…
We have carried out systematic fracture experiments in a single edge notch geometry over a range of stretch rates on dual crosslink hydrogels made from polyvinyl alcohol chains chemically crosslinked with glutaraldehyde and physically…
We investigate the influence of microstructural traps on hydrogen diffusion and embrittlement in the presence of cyclic loads. A mechanistic, multi-trap model for hydrogen transport is developed, implemented into a finite element framework,…
Fatigue fracture in ductile materials, e. g. metals, is caused by cyclic plasticity. Especially regarding the high numbers of load cycles, plastic material models resolving the full loading path are computationally very demanding. Herein, a…
To clarify effects of crack speed and cross-link density on fracture energy of acrylamide gels, we evaluated the roughness of the fracture surface and measured the fracture energy taking into account the roughness. The fracture energy…
Hydrogel consists of a crosslinked polymer matrix imbibed with a solvent such as water at volume fractions that can exceed 90\%. They are important in many scientific and engineering applications due to their tunable physiochemical…
A novel variational framework to model the fatigue behavior of brittle materials based on a phase-field approach to fracture is presented. The standard regularized free energy functional is modified introducing a fatigue degradation…
It was experimentally confirmed that if steel cyclic stress reduces to less than tensile yield stress values, i.e. in case of high-cycle fatigue, the mechanism of fracture changes from dislocation to vacancy one. This conclusion was based…
Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and…
Pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) are viscoelastic polymers that can form fast and robust adhesion with various adherends under fingertip pressure. The rapidly expanding application domain of PSAs, such as healthcare, wearable…
We explore the Mode I fracture toughness of a polymer gel containing a semi-infinite, growing crack. First, an expression is derived for the energy release rate within the linearized, small-strain setting. This expression reveals a crack…
Recently, the phase field method has been increasingly used for brittle fractures in soft materials like polymers, elastomers, and biological tissues. When considering finite deformations to account for the highly deformable nature of soft…
Physically assembled gels have promising applications in many fields because of their tunable mechanical properties. Here, we report the mechanical properties as a function of polymer volume fraction ($\phi$) for a physical gel system…
A novel FFT-based phase-field fracture framework for modelling fatigue crack initiation and propagation at the microscale is presented. A damage driving force is defined based on the stored energy and dislocation density, relating…
Most tough hydrogels are reinforced by introducing sacrificial structures that can dissipate input energy. However, since the sacrificial damages cannot recover instantly, the toughness of these gels drops substantially during consecutive…