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The presence of desiccation cracks in soils can significantly alter their mechanical and hydrological properties. In many circumstances, desiccation cracking in soils can cause significant damage to earthen or soil supported structures. For…
Natural hard composites like human bone possess a combination of strength and toughness that exceeds that of their constituents and of many engineered composites. This augmentation is attributed to their complex hierarchical structure,…
It has been recently recognized that the surface of sub-km asteroids in contact with the space environment is not fine-grained regolith but consists of centimeter to meter-scale rocks. Here we aim to understand how the rocky morphology of…
Shear strength and cohesion of granular materials are important geotechnical properties that play a crucial role in the stability and behavior of lunar and Martian regolith, as well as their terrestrial analog materials. To characterize and…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
Despite advances in manufacturing making metal functionally graded materials (FGMs) more common, numerical methods for predicting fracture in ductile functionally graded materials remain limited. In this work we study the crack propagation…
The failure of mechanical metamaterials is a function of the interplay between the properties of the base material and the microstructural geometry. Stochastic failure properties of the base material and disordered microstructural…
We introduce a model for the dynamics of mud cracking in the limit of of extremely thin layers. In this model the growth of fracture proceeds by selecting the part of the material with the smallest (quenched) breaking threshold. In…
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…
In this article we propose a discrete lattice model to simulate the elastic, plastic and failure behaviour of isotropic materials. Focus is given on the mathematical derivation of the lattice elements, nodes and edges, in the presence of…
A probabilistic approach to phase-field brittle and ductile fracture with random material and geometric properties is proposed within this work. In the macroscopic failure mechanics, materials properties and exactness of spatial quantities…
Planets are often covered with thin cracked shells. From mud films to lithospheres of rock or ice, fracture networks form two-dimensional (2D) tessellations of convex polygons whose geometry encodes their genesis. Here we chart the geometry…
We study the high-velocity regime mode-I fracture instability when small microbranches start to appear near the main crack, using large scale simulations. Some of the features of those microbranches have been reproduced qualitatively in…
We study the transverse cracking of the 90 degree ply in [0/90] cross-ply laminates by means of a discrete element method. To model the 90 degree ply a two-dimensional triangular lattice of springs is constructed where nodes of the lattice…
Tools have been developed to model and simulate the effects of lunar landing vehicles on the lunar environment, mostly addressing the effects of regolith erosion by rocket plumes and the fate of the ejected lunar soil particles. The KSC…
During brittle crack propagation, a smooth crack front curve frequently becomes disjoint, generating a stepped crack and a material ligament that unites the newly formed crack fronts. These universal features fundamentally alter the…
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…
We show that for the simulation of crack propagation in quasi-brittle, two-dimensional solids, very good results can be obtained with an embedded strong discontinuity quadrilateral finite element that has incompatible modes. Even more…
Strong interaction of closely located, nearly parallel hydraulic fractures and its influence on their propagation are studied. Both computational and physical aspects of the problem are considered. It is shown that from the computational…
Multiphysics processes in fractured porous media is a research field of importance for several subsurface applications and has received considerable attention over the last decade. The dynamics are characterised by strong couplings between…