Related papers: Crack formation and self-closing in shrinkable, gr…
Hydrated granular packings often crack into discrete clusters of grains when dried. Despite its ubiquity, accurate prediction of cracking remains elusive. Here, we elucidate the previously overlooked role of individual grain shrinkage---a…
The material properties of polycrystals are strongly affected by the evolution and coarsening of their internal grain structures. Yet, studying this process is challenging due to the complex interactions within grain boundary networks.…
We have studied shrinkage crack patterns which form when a thin layer of an alumina/water slurry dries. Both isotropic and directional drying were studied. The dynamics of the pattern formation process and the geometric properties of the…
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,…
Grain growth fundamentally shapes the microstructure of crystalline materials upon annealing, affecting their overall mechanical and functional properties. Recently, it has been rationalized that grain growth in polycrystals does not result…
Molecular dynamics simulations were used to quantify mechanically-induced structural evolution in nanocrystalline Al with an average grain size of 5 nm. A polycrystalline sample was cyclically strained at different temperatures, while a…
A deposited drop of bovine serum albumin salt solution experiences both gelation and fracturation during evaporation. The cracks appearing at the edge of the gelling drop are regularly spaced, due to the competition between the…
Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored…
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…
The local and global dynamics of a sheared granular medium are studied in a model experiment as a function of several macroscopic parameters. We observe that by changing the shear rate or the loading stiffness, the system crackles, with…
Starch-water slurries are commonly used to study fracture dynamics. Drying starch-cakes benefit from being simple, economical, and reproducible systems, and have been used to model desiccation fracture in soils, thin film fracture in paint,…
Superficial (two dimensional) crack patterns appear when a thin layer of material elastically attached to a substrate contracts. We study numerically the maturation process undergone by these crack patterns when they are allowed to adapt in…
We model two-dimensional systems of granular aggregates confined between two planes and demonstrate that at a critical grain volume fraction an abrupt rigidity transition occurs. This transition is observed both in static and shear tests.…
Physical understanding of the links between soil swelling, texture, structure, cracking, and sample size is of great interest for the physical understanding of many processes in the soil-air-water system and for applications in civil,…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
The invasion of air into porous systems in drying processes is often localized in soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions and granular pastes, and it typically develops in the form of cracks before ordinary drying begins. To…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
While cracking is a complex dynamics that involves material intrinsic properties like grain shape and size distribution, elastic properties of grain and cementing materials, and extrinsic properties of loading, in this work, the focus has…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
Granular materials undergo compaction under periodic temperature fluctuations, leading to various engineering and geological phenomena from landslides to silo compaction. Although thermal effects on granular materials have been extensively…