Related papers: Crack arrest through branching at curved weak inte…
The results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of the friction at an interface between polymer melts and weakly attractive crystalline surfaces are reported. We consider a coarse-grained bead-spring model of linear chains with…
We consider the dynamics and kinetic roughening of wetting fronts in the case of forced wetting driven by a constant mass flux into a 2D disordered medium. We employ a coarse-grained phase field model with local conservation of density,…
We report on the onset of fluid entrainment when a contact line is forced to advance over a dry solid of arbitrary wettability. We show that entrainment occurs at a critical advancing speed beyond which the balance between capillary,…
The failure of frictional interfaces -- the process of frictional rupture -- is widely assumed to feature crack-like properties, with far-reaching implications for various disciplines, ranging from engineering tribology to earthquake…
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…
The growth of multicomponent structures in simulations and experiments often results in kinetically trapped, nonequilibrium objects. In such cases we have no general theoretical framework for predicting the outcome of the growth process.…
When a crack interacts with material heterogeneities, its front distorts and adopts complex tortuous configurations that are reminiscent of the energy barriers encountered during crack propagation. As such, the study of crack front…
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 study erratically moving spatial structures that are found in a driven interface in a random medium at the depinning threshold. We introduce a bond-disordered variant of the Sneppen model and study the effect of extremal dynamics on the…
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…
Predicting potential risks associated with the fatigue of key structural components is crucial in engineering design. However, fatigue often involves entangled complexities of material microstructures and service conditions, making…
Doubly curved thin concrete shells are very efficient building structures, suitable for light-weight construction because of their high structural stability. In the process of constructing such shells, an efficient innovative flexible…
The growth rate of material interfaces is an important proxy for mixing and reaction rates in fluid dynamics, and can also be used to identify regions of coherence. Estimating such growth rates can be difficult, since they depend on…
The problem of predicting the growth of a system of cracks, each crack influencing the growth of the others, arises in multiple fields. We develop an analytical framework toward this aim, which we apply to the `En-Passant' family of crack…
A theory for kinetic arrest in isotropic systems of repulsive, radially-interacting particles is presented that predicts exponents for the scaling of various macroscopic quantities near the rigidity transition that are in agreement with…
The phase-field approach to fracture has been proven to be a mathematically sound and easy to implement method for computing crack propagation with arbitrary crack paths. Hereby crack growth is driven by energy minimization resulting in a…
Unstable growth of cracks (rough crack surface and crack branching) in dynamic fracture has long been observed in various materials. Until now, there was no universally agreed upon explanation for these instabilities. Here, we demonstrate…
This paper presents an experimental study of the fretting crack nucleation threshold, expressed in terms of loading conditions, with a cylinder/plane contact. The studied material is a damage tolerant aluminium alloy widely used in the…
Adhesion hysteresis can be caused by elastic instabilities that are triggered by surface roughness or chemical heterogeneity. However, the role of these instabilities in adhesion hysteresis remains poorly understood because we lack…
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…