Related papers: A model for the fragmentation kinetics of crumpled…

Lattice defects in crystalline materials create long-range elastic fields which can be modelled on the atomistic scale using an infinite system of discrete nonlinear force balance equations. Starting with these equations, this work…

Disordered materials under an imposed forcing can display creep and aging effects, accompanied by intermittent, spatially heterogeneous dynamics. We propose a unifying microscopic description of these phenomena, based on the notion that as…

Thin elastic sheets bend easily, leading to mechanical instabilities such as wrinkling. Here, we investigate wrinkles at edges of bi-strips, which consist of two thin sheets, one that swells and one that does not, joined side-by-side. It is…

We revisit the delamination of a solid adhesive sheet under uniaxial compression from a flat, rigid substrate. Using energetic considerations and scaling arguments we show that the phenomenology is governed by three dimensionless groups,…

Fracture networks are ubiquitous in nature, spanning scales from millimeter-sized cracks in botanical peels to hundred-kilometer-long lineae on planetary satellites. The propagation of a crack is a complex, nonlinear phenomenon governed by…

We investigate the formation of spiral crack patterns during the desiccation of thin layers of precipitates in contact with a substrate. This symmetry-breaking fracturing mode is found to arise naturally not from torsion forces, but from a…

This study focused on the expansion in polydisperse granular materials owing to mechanical annealing, which involved compression and decompression. Following minor annealing, the polydisperse systems exhibited compaction as well as the…

The conformational statistics of ring polymers in melts or dense solutions is strongly affected by their quenched microscopic topological state. The effect is particularly strong for untangled (i.e. non-concatenated and unknotted) rings,…

We establish a complete picture of condensation in the inclusion process in the thermodynamic limit with vanishing diffusion, covering all scaling regimes of the diffusion parameter and including large deviation results for the maximum…

We consider a model of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. In the case in which the film expands relative to the substrate and assuming certain non-linear elastic behavior of the film, expansion ridges may appear, in…

Slow crack propagation in ductile, and in certain brittle materials, appears to take place via the nucleation of voids ahead of the crack tip due to plastic yields, followed by the coalescence of these voids. Post mortem analysis of the…

A buckled sheet offers a reservoir of material that can be unfurled at a later time. For sufficiently thin yet stiff materials, this geometric process has a striking mechanical feature: when the slack runs out, the material locks to further…

We report a novel mode of oscillatory crack propagation when a cutting tip is driven through a thin brittle polymer film. The phenomenon is so robust that it can easily be reproduced at hand (using CD packaging material for example).…

We study the genesis and the selective propagation of complex crack networks induced by thermal shock or drying of brittle materials. We use a quasi-static gradient damage model to perform large scale numerical simulations showing that the…

We present a detailed study of a two-dimensional minimal lattice model for the description of mud cracking in the limit of extremely thin layers. In this model each bond of the lattice is assigned to a (quenched) breaking threshold.…

How does a shell explode into a series of fragments upon impact? The well accepted explanation is Mott's theory, which considers the fragmentation of shells as a random process controlled by defects. However, Mott's theory is inadequate due…

We present a detailed systematical theoretical analysis of the post-growth processes occurring in nanofractals grown on surface. For this study we developed a method which accounts for the internal dynamics of particles in a fractal. We…

Growth-fragmentation processes model systems of cells that grow continuously over time and then fragment into smaller pieces. Typically, on average, the number of cells in the system exhibits asynchronous exponential growth and, upon…

We develop a unified scaling framework for the end-position distributions of tethered polymers confined in finite cylindrical geometries. Two observables are analysed: the longitudinal distribution P(x), along the confinement axis, and the…

An investigation of the effect of surface diffusion in random deposition model is made by analytical methods and reasoning. For any given site, the extent to which a particle can diffuse is decided by the morphology in the immediate…