Related papers: Safe equilibrium and crack growth in inhomogeneous…
Predicting the growth of large cracks in brittle materials is a fundamental unresolved problem in fracture mechanics. Under out-of-plane shear loading, an initially planar crack may fragment into multiple cracks, forming an echelon crack…
A mathematical continuum limit of the interaction energy of a random particle chain is shown to yield new insight into the effect of microscopic heterogeneities on macroscopic fracture laws in brittle materials. We derive a formula which…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…
Slow crack growth in a model of homogenous brittle elastic material is described as a thermal activation process where stress fluctuations allow to overcome a breaking threshold through a series of irreversible steps. We study the case of a…
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…
A general theory of thermodynamically consistent biomechanical--biochemical growth in a body, considering mass addition in the bulk and at an incoherent interface, is developed. The incoherency arises due to incompatibility of growth and…
In this paper, we prove a new existence result for a variational model of crack growth in brittle materials proposed in [15]. We consider the case of $n$-dimensional finite elasticity, for an arbitrary $n\ge1$, with a quasiconvex bulk…
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…
Using an elastostatic description of crack growth based on the Griffith criterion and the principle of local symmetry, we present a stochastic model describing the propagation of a crack tip in a 2D heterogeneous brittle material. The model…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
The problem of dynamic symmetric branching of an initial single brittle crack propagating at a given speed under plane loading conditions is studied within a continuum mechanics approach. Griffith's energy criterion and the principle of…
We investigate dynamic fracture of heterogeneous materials experimentally by measuring displacement fields as a rupture propagates through a periodic array of obstacles of controlled fracture energy. Our measurements demonstrate the…
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…
We study the stability and roughness of propagating cracks in heterogeneous brittle two-dimensional elastic materials. We begin by deriving an equation of motion describing the dynamics of such a crack in the framework of Linear Elastic…
Various kinds of heterogeneity in solids including atomistic discreteness affect the fracture strength as well as the failure dynamics remarkably. Here we study the effects of an initial crack in a discrete model for fracture in…
Visco-energetic solutions have been recently advanced as a new solution concept for rate-independent systems, alternative to energetic solutions/quasistatic evolutions and balanced viscosity solutions. In the spirit of this novel concept,…
We present a model for stable crack growth in a constrained geometry. The morphology of such cracks show scaling properties consistent with self affinity. Recent experiments show that there are two distinct self-affine regimes, one on small…
Crack propagation in viscoelastic materials has been understood with the use of Barenblatt cohesive models by many authors since the 1970's. In polymers and metal creep, it is customary to assume that the relaxed modulus is zero, so that we…
We discuss steady state crack growth in the spirit of a free boundary problem. It turns out that mode I and mode III situations are very different from each other: In particular, mode III exhibits a pronounced transition towards unstable…
We present some recent existence results for the variational model of crack growth in brittle materials proposed by Francfort and Marigo in 1998. These results, obtained in collaboration with Francfort and Toader, cover the case of…