Related papers: Crack formation and self-closing in shrinkable, gr…

Granular packings display a wealth of mechanical features which are of widespread significance. One of these features is creep: the slow deformation under applied stress. Creep is common for many other amorphous materials such as many…

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…

Cohesive granular materials, like wet sand, retain their shape before yielding under stress. This solid-like behavior is associated with elasticity. As the loading increases, the material typically flows. However, cohesive materials can…

After rainfall, pine needles often float on the surface of small puddles. As the water evaporates, they self-assemble into distinct clusters. Motivated by this natural phenomenon, we experimentally investigate the dynamic evolution of…

We report an experimental study of the crack pattern formed during the drying of a colloidal suspension. A horizontal fiber, which provides a one dimensional, boundary-free substrate, is coated by a film of micronic thickness. The geometry…

Drying of colloidal dispersion and their consolidation into a particulate deposit is a common phenomenon. This process involves various physical processes such as diffusion of liquid molecules into the ambient atmosphere and advection of…

Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…

The design and development of a parallel plate shear cell for the study of large scale shear flows in granular materials is presented. The parallel plate geometry allows for shear studies without the effects of curvature found in the more…

The growth dynamics of a single crack in a heterogeneous material under subcritical loading is an intermittent process; and many features of this dynamics have been shown to agree with simple models of thermally activated rupture. In order…

A fascinating class of patterns, often encountered in nature as meandering cracks on rocks, dried-out fields and tectonic plates is produced by the fracture of solids. Here we report the observation and modeling of an unusual type of…

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…

The presence of interparticle cohesion can drastically change the behavior of granular materials. For instance, powders are challenging to handle, and one can make a sandcastle using wet grains. In this study, we report experimental results…

The formation of three-dimensional prismatic cracks in the drying process of starch-water mixtures is investigated numerically. We assume that the mixture is an elastic porous medium which possesses a stress field and a water content field.…

The way granular materials response to an applied shear stress is of the utmost relevance to both human activities and natural environment. One of the their most intriguing and less understood behavior, is the stick-instability, whose most…

Strain hardening is a key feature observed in many rocks deformed in the so-called ``semi-brittle'' regime, where both crystal plastic and brittle deformation mechanisms operate. Dislocation storage has long been recognised as a major…

Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…

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,…

We investigate the dynamic evolution of jamming in granular media through fluctuations in the granular drag force. The successive collapse and formation of jammed states give a stick-slip nature to the fluctuations which is independent of…

Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…

This study addresses ductile fracture of single grains in metals by modeling of the formation and propagation of transgranular cracks. A proposed model integrates gradient extended hardening, phase-field modeling for fracture, and crystal…