Related papers: How moving cracks in brittle solids choose their p…
A dynamic crack will travel in a straight path up to a material-dependent critical speed beyond which its path becomes erratic. Predicting this critical speed and discovering the origin of this instability are two outstanding problems in…
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,…
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…
The propagation of an interfacial crack front through a weak plane of a transparent Plexiglas block has been studied experimentally. A stable crack in mode I was generated by loading the system by an imposed displacement. The local…
Being able to accurately model and predict the dynamics of dispersed inclusions transported by a turbulent flow, remains a challenge with important scientific, environmental and economical issues. One critical and difficult point is to…
Spontaneous brittle fracture is studied based on the recently introduced model (Mishuris and Slepyan, Brittle fracture in a periodic structure with internal potential energy. Proc. Roy. Soc. A, in press). A periodic structure is considered,…
Fracture growth in a material is strongly influenced by the presence of inhomogeneities, which deviate crack trajectories from rectilinearity and deeply affect failure. Increasing crack tortuosity is connected to enhancement of fracture…
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…
Linear elastic fracture mechanics theory predicts that the speed of crack growth is limited by the Rayleigh wave speed. Although many experimental observations and numerical simulations have supported this prediction, some exceptions have…
Patterns on broken surfaces are well-known from everyday experience, but surprisingly, how and why they form are very much open questions. Well-defined facets are commonly observed1-4 along fracture surfaces which are created by slow…
We study the appearance and evolution of an array of parallel cracks in a thin slab of material that is directionally dried, and show that the cracks penetrate the material uniformly if the drying front is sufficiently sharp. We also show…
Cracks in soft materials exhibit diverse dynamic patterns, involving straight, oscillation, branching, and supershear fracture. Here, we successfully reproduce these crack morphologies in a two-dimensional pre-strained fracture scenario and…
We study experimentally the paths of an assembly of cracks growing in interaction in a heterogeneous two-dimensional elastic brittle material submitted to uniaxial stress. For a given initial crack assembly geometry, we observe two types of…
We present a continuum theory which describes the fast growth of a crack by surface diffusion. This mechanism overcomes the usual cusp singularity by a self-consistent selection of the crack tip radius. It predicts the saturation of the…
Brittle fracturing of materials is common in natural and industrial processes over a variety of length scales. Knowledge of individual particle dynamics is vital to obtain deeper insight into the atomistic processes governing crack…
A newly developed sharp interface model describes crack propagation by a phase transition process. We solve this free boundary problem numerically and obtain steady state solutions with a self-consistently selected propagation velocity and…
The propagation of a 3D crack in an heterogeneous material is studied using a phase field model. It is shown that in the case of randomly distributed inclusions of soft material in a matrix, the nature of the distribution has little effect…
Crack initiation and propagation in elastic - perfectly plastic bodies is studied in a phase-field or variational gradient damage formulation. A rate-independent formulation that naturally couples elasticity, perfect plasticity and fracture…
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 modeling of crack propagation in a heterogeneous material using a phase field model is studied numerically in a simple test case: the crack meets a wedge of higher fracture energy. It is shown that when the crack cannot enter the wedge,…