Related papers: Crack formation and self-closing in shrinkable, gr…
Many technologically useful materials are polycrystals composed of a myriad of small monocrystalline grains separated by grain boundaries. Dynamics of grain boundaries play a crucial role in determining the grain structure and defining the…
Cracks in clay are significant in geotechnical and geoenvironmental engineering (e.g., embankment erosion and stability of landfill cover systems). This article studies the mechanism of nucleation and growth of cracks in clay at the…
In jamming systems like colloids, emulsions, foams, and biological tissues, significant deformation is essential for processes such as material scraping or wound self-healing. To adequately spread a foam or cream over a surface, external…
The ability of amorphous intergranular films to mitigate damage formation at grain boundaries is studied with molecular dynamics simulations. We find that such films can alter both crack nucleation and crack growth rates by efficiently…
A recent report on successful employment of the grain boundary strengthening to design extraordinarily damage-tolerant architected materials (i.e. meta-crystals) necessitates fundamental studies to understand the underlying mechanisms…
This paper discusses a continuum approach to track the evolution of permeability in granular rocks by accounting for the combined effect of porosity changes, grain breakage and cement bond damage. To account for such a broad range of…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
Granular materials are involved in most industrial and environmental processes, as well as many civil engineering applications. Although significant advances have been made in understanding the statics and dynamics of cohesionless grains…
In the field of freezing colloidal suspensions, it is important to understand the particle-scale behavior of particle packing. Here, we reveal the dynamics of particle packing by identifying the behavior of each single particle in situ. The…
Instability patterns of rolling up a sleeve appear more intricate than the ones of walking over a rug on floor, both characterized as uniaxially compressed soft-film/stiff-substrate systems. This can be explained by curvature effects. To…
Highly-deformable materials, from synthetic hydrogels to biological tissues, are becoming increasingly important from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Their mechanical behaviors, in particular the dynamics of crack propagation…
When pollen grains become exposed to the environment, they rapidly desiccate. To protect themselves until rehydration, the grains undergo characteristic infolding with the help of special structures in the grain wall---apertures---where the…
Confinement of a slender body into a granular array induces stress localization in the geometrically nonlinear structure, and jamming, reordering, and vertical dislocation of the surrounding granular medium. By varying the initial packing…
The dynamics of a bi-dimensional dense granular packing under cyclic shear is experimentally investigated close to the jamming transition. Measurement of multi-point correlation functions are produced. The self-intermediate scattering…
When colloidal suspensions dry, stresses build up and cracks often occur - a phenomenon undesirable for important industries such as paint and ceramics. We demonstrate an effective method which can completely eliminate cracking during…
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…
The kinetics of dislocations is studied with computer simulation at loadings of different intensity. It is established that the dislocations have a few different structural states. The dislocations "with the micropore" play important role…
Physical understanding of the crack origin and quantitative physical prediction of the crack volume variation far from the clay soil surface are necessary to protect the underlying aquifers from pollutants. The basis of this work is an…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Shear banding is widely observed in natural fault zones as well as in gouge layers in laboratory experiments. Understanding the dynamics of strain localization under different loading conditions is essential for quantifying strength…