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High performance sheet metals with a multi-phase microstructure suffer from deformation induced damage formation during forming in the constituent phases but importantly also where these intersect. To capture damage in terms of the physical…
Thin layers of elastomers bonded to two rigid plates demonstrate unusual failure response. Historically, it has been believed that strongly-bonded layers fail by two distinct mechanisms: (i) internal/external penny-shaped crack nucleation…
Entangled polymers are deformed by a strong shear flow. The shape of the polymer, called the form factor, is measured by small angle neutron scattering. However, the real-space molecular structure is not directly available from the…
Flow-induced failure of granular materials is relevant to a broad range of geomechanical applications. Plasticity, which is the inherent failure mechanism of most granular materials, enables large deformations that can invalidate linearised…
Elastomers filled with liquid inclusions -- as opposed to conventional solid fillers -- are a recent trend in the soft matter community because of their unique range of mechanical and physical properties. Such properties stem, in part, from…
Strength, ductility, and failure properties of metals are tailored by plastic deformation routes. Predicting these properties requires modeling of the structural dynamics and stress evolution taking place on several length scales. Progress…
Materials deform elasto-plastically and fail under various loading conditions, typically quantified by the stress triaxiality, which is the ratio between the dilatational (hydrostatic) stress and the deviatoric (shear-like) one. We show…
Cavitation in soft elastomers and adhesives is often viewed as an elastic instability, commonly tied to the study of incompressible solids. It is the first step prior to fibrillation and ultimate failure in adhesives. Building on the work…
Complex flow fields govern the deformation of polymers in various manufacturing processes. However, high flow rates may trigger reaction events (i.e., bond breaking or undesirable reaction of mechanophores) in raw polymeric materials,…
Understanding and mitigating the failure of reinforced elastomers has been a long-standing challenge in many industrial applications. In an early attempt to shed light on the fundamental mechanisms of failure, Gent and Park presented a…
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…
Progressive damage, which eventually leads to failure, is ubiquitous in biological and synthetic polymers. The simplest case to consider is that of elastomeric materials, which can undergo large reversible deformations with negligible rate…
This work outlines a diffuse interface method for the study of fracture and fragmentation in ductile metals at high strain-rates in Eulerian finite volume simulations. The work is based on an existing diffuse interface method capable of…
We present a new finite deformation, dynamic finite element model that incorporates surface tension to capture elastocapillary effects on the electromechanical deformation of dielectric elastomers. We demonstrate the significant effect that…
In an extension of Fischera & Martin (2012a) and Heitsch (2013), two aspects of the evolution of externally pressurized, hydrostatic filaments are discussed. (a) The free-fall accretion of gas onto such a filament will lead to filament…
Many new soft but tough rubbery materials have been recently discovered and new applications such as flexible prosthetics, stretchable electrodes or soft robotics continuously emerge. Yet, a credible multi-scale quantitative picture of…
This paper presents a macroscopic theory, alongside its numerical implementation, aimed at describing, explaining, and predicting the nucleation and propagation of fracture in viscoelastic materials subjected to quasistatic loading…
The nucleation of cavities in a homogenous polymer under tensile strain is investigated in a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation. In order to establish a causal relation between local microstructure and the onset of cavitation, a…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Soft materials capable of large inelastic deformation play an essential role in high-performance nacre-inspired architectured materials with a combination of stiffness, strength and toughness. The rigid "building blocks" made from glass or…