Related papers: Crack growth by vanishing viscosity in planar elas…
Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale…
In viscoelastic materials, individually short-lived bonds collectively result in a mechanical resistance which is long-lived but finite, as ultimately cracks appear. Here we provide a microscopic mechanism by which cracks emerge from the…
Crack growth is the basic mechanism leading to the failure of brittle materials. Engineering addresses this problem within the framework of continuum mechanics, which links deterministically the crack motion to the applied loading. Such an…
The nucleation and/or growth of cracks in elastic-brittle solids has been recently described in [14] in terms of a special class of measures and with a variational technique requiring the minimization of a certain energy over classes of…
In this paper we consider a dynamic model of fracture for viscoelastic materials, in which the constitutive relation, involving the Cauchy stress and the strain tensors, is given in an implicit nonlinear form. We prove the existence of a…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
Slow crack growth in a model of homogenous brittle elastic material is described as a thermal activation process where stress fluctuations allow to overcome a breaking threshold through a series of irreversible steps. We study the case of a…
Crack advance from short or long pre-cracks is predicted by the progressive failure of a cohesive zone in a strain gradient, elasto-plastic solid. The presence of strain gradients leads to the existence of an elastic zone at the tip of a…
We investigate crack propagation in a simple two-dimensional visco-elastic model and find a scaling regime in the relation between the propagation velocity and energy release rate or fracture energy, together with lower and upper bounds of…
This paper is devoted to the characterization of the energy release rate of a crack which is merely closed, connected, and with density $1/2$ at the tip. First, the blow-up limit of the displacement is analyzed, and the convergence to the…
We consider atomistic systems consisting of interacting particles arranged in atomic lattices whose quasi-static evolution is driven by time-dependent boundary conditions. The interaction of the particles is modeled by classical interaction…
While crack nucleation and propagation in the brittle or quasi-brittle regime can be predicted via variational or material-force-based phase field fracture models, these models often assume that the underlying elastic response of the…
A nonlocal field theory of peridynamic type is applied to model the brittle fracture problem. The elastic fields obtained from the nonlocal model are shown to converge in the limit of vanishing non-locality to solutions of classic plane…
This paper presents a formulation for brittle fracture in 3D elastic solids within the context of configurational mechanics. The local form of the first law of thermodynamics provides a condition for equilibrium of the crack front. The…
Cracks in brittle materials produce two types of generic surface structures: facets at low velocities and micro-branches at higher ones. Here we observe a transition from faceting to micro-branching in polyacrylamide gels that is…
The properties of slow crack growth in brittle materials are analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. We propose a model based on a thermally activated rupture process. Considering a 2D spring network submitted to an external load…
We present some recent existence results for the variational model of crack growth in brittle materials proposed by Francfort and Marigo in 1998. These results, obtained in collaboration with Francfort and Toader, cover the case of…
Analytic relations that describe crack growth are vital for modeling experiments and building a theoretical understanding of fracture. Upon constructing an idealized model system for the crack and applying the principles of statistical…
When branching is suppressed, rapid cracks undergo a dynamic instability from a straight to an oscillatory path at a critical velocity $v_c$. In a systematic experimental study using a wide range of different brittle materials, we first…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…