Related papers: De-localizing brittle fracture
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…
In many scenarios -- when we bite food or during a crash -- fracture is inevitable. Finding solutions to steer fracture to mitigate its impact or turn it into a purposeful functionality, is therefore crucial. Strategies using composites,…
We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown…
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…
Mechanical metamaterials with engineered failure properties typically rely on periodic unit cell geometries or bespoke microstructures to achieve their unique properties. We demonstrate that intelligent use of disorder in metamaterials…
Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling…
Failure in brittle materials under dynamic loading conditions is a result of the propagation and coalescence of microcracks. Simulating this mechanism at the continuum level is computationally expensive or, in some cases, intractable. The…
Plasticity in soft amorphous materials typically involves collective deformation patterns that emerge upon intense shearing. The microscopic basis of amorphous plasticity has been commonly established through the notion of "Eshelby"-type…
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…
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…
Rapid progress in additive manufacturing methods has created a new class of ultralight and strong architected metamaterials that resemble periodic truss structures. The mechanical performance of these metamaterials with a very large number…
A new gradient-based formulation for predicting fracture in elastic-plastic solids is presented. Damage is captured by means of a phase field model that considers both the elastic and plastic works as driving forces for fracture. Material…
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…
Mechanical reliability plays an outsized role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they can experience during manufacturing and operation. These devices are typically…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
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…
Quasi-brittle behavior where macroscopic failure is preceded by stable damaging and intensive cracking activity is a desired feature of materials because it makes fracture predictable. Based on a fiber bundle model with global load sharing…
Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) provides a consistent framework to evaluate quantitatively the energy flux released to the tip of a growing crack. Still, the way in which the crack selects its velocity in response to this energy…
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,…
Our goal is to unravel the mechanisms that lead to failure of a ductile two-phase material - that consists of a ductile soft phase and a relatively brittle hard phase. An idealized microstructural model is used to study damage propagation…