Related papers: Crack formation and self-closing in shrinkable, gr…
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…
The existence of a very special ratcheting regime has recently been reported in a granular packing subjected to cyclic loading \cite{alonso04}. In this state, the system accumulates a small permanent deformation after each cycle. After a…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and industry; their mechanical behavior has been of academic and engineering interest for centuries. One of the reasons for their rather complex mechanical behavior is that stresses exerted on a…
We employ a recently developed model that allows the study of two-dimensional brittle crack propagation under fixed grip boundary conditions. The crack development highlights the importance of voids which appear ahead of the crack as…
When a colloidal gel dries through evaporation, cracks are usually formed, which often reveal underlying processes at work during desiccation. Desiccating colloid droplets of few hundred $\mu l$ size show interesting effects of pattern…
We study the fragment size distributions after crushing of single and many particles under uniaxial compression inside a cylindrical container by means of numerical simulations. Under the assumption that breaking goes through the bulk of…
Substrate wettability alteration induced control over crack formation process in thin colloidal films has been addressed in the present study. Colloidal nanosuspension (53nm, mean particle diameter) droplets have been subjected to natural…
Upon mechanical loading, granular materials yield and undergo plastic deformation. The nature of plastic deformation is essential for the development of the macroscopic constitutive models and the understanding of shear band formation.…
Granular material exposed to shear shows a variety of unique phenomena: Reynolds dilatancy, positional order and orientational order effects may compete in the shear zone. We study granular packings consisting of macroscopic prolate, oblate…
From small seeds falling from trees to asteroids colliding with planets and moons, the impact of projectiles onto granular targets occurs in nature at different scales. In this paper, we investigate open questions in the mechanics of…
We investigate the drag forces acting on large objects moving through a granular packing immersed in water. In this aim, we conducted uplift experiments involving pulling out horizontal plates at a prescribed velocity vertically. During…
We study the impact of a projectile onto a bed of 3 mm grains immersed in an index-matched fluid. Specifically, we vary the amount of prestrain on the sample, strengthening the force chains within the system. We find this affects only the…
The elastic response of the crystalline sheet to the stretching deformation in the form of wrinkles has been extensively investigated. In this work, we extend this fundamental scientific question to the plastic regime by exploring the…
Soft and frangible materials that remodel under flow can give rise to branched patterns shaped by material properties, boundary conditions, and the time scales of forcing. We present a general theoretical framework for emergent branching in…
Inhomogeneities in deposition may lead to formation of rough surfaces, whose height fluctuations can be probed directly by scanning microscopy, or indirectly by scattering. Analytical or numerical treatments of simple growth models suggest…
While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material…
The pattern development of multiple cracks in extremely anisotropic solids such as bilayer or multilayer two-dimensional (2D) crystals contains rich physics, which, however, remains largely unexplored. We studied crack interaction across…
Nanocrystalline metals with average grain sizes of only a few nanometers have recently been observed to fail through the formation of shear bands. Here, we investigate this phenomenon in nanocrystalline Ni which has had its grain structure…
The concept of cracking refers to the tendency of a fluid distribution to "split'', once it abandons the equilibrium. In this manuscript we develop a general formalism to describe the occurrence of cracking within a dissipative fluid…
When fast cracks become unstable to microscopic branching (micro-branching), fracture no longer occurs in an effective 2D medium. We follow in-plane crack front dynamics via real-time measurements in brittle gels as micro-branching unfolds…