Related papers: Effective toughness of heterogeneous materials wit…
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:…
We approach the problem of heterogeneous dynamic fracture by considering spatiotemporal perturbations to planar crack fronts. Front propagation is governed by local energy balance between the elastic energy per unit area available to…
The temporal evolution of mechanical energy and spatially-averaged crack speed are both monitored in slowly fracturing artificial rocks. Both signals display an irregular burst-like dynamics, with power-law distributed fluctuations spanning…
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of a crack front during the micro-instabilities taking place in heterogeneous materials between two successive equilibrium positions. We focus specifically on the spatio-temporal…
Fracture of materials with rate-dependent mechanical behaviour, e.g. polymers, is a highly complex process. For an adequate modelling, the coupling between rate-dependent stiffness, dissipative mechanisms present in the bulk material and…
An estimate of the effective toughness of heterogeneous materials is proposed based on the Phase Field Fracture model implemented in an FFT homogenization solver. The estimate is based on the simulation of the deformation of representative…
In this contribution, a variational diffuse modeling framework for cracks in heterogeneous media is presented. A static order parameter smoothly bridges the discontinuity at material interfaces, while an evolving phase-field captures the…
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…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
In this paper we first obtain the order of stress singularity for a dynamically propagating self-affine fractal crack. We then show that there is always an upper bound to roughness, i.e. a propagating fractal crack reaches a terminal…
A mathematical continuum limit of the interaction energy of a random particle chain is shown to yield new insight into the effect of microscopic heterogeneities on macroscopic fracture laws in brittle materials. We derive a formula which…
Statistics and thermally activated dynamics of crack nucleation and propagation in a two-dimensional heterogeneous material containing quenched randomly distributed defects are studied theoretically. Using the generalized Griffith criterion…
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…
Rock formations are very often characterized by the presence of fractures that have grown subcritically over geological time scales and under evolving stress fields. In mechanically layered systems, such fractures can either become…
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…
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…
Most of the research concerting crack propagation in discrete media is concerned with specific types of external loading: displacements on the boundaries, or constant energy fluxes or feeding waves originating from infinity. In this paper…
We report results on the interrelation between driving force, roughness exponent, branching and crack speed in a finite element model. We show that for low applied loadings the crack speed reaches the values measured in the experiments, and…
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 study how the loading rate, specimen geometry and microstructural texture select the dynamics of a crack moving through an heterogeneous elastic material in the quasi-static approximation. We find a transition, fully controlled by two…