Related papers: Nucleation and development of multiple cracks in t…
We present an extension of the continuous damage fiber bundle model to describe the gradual degradation of highly heterogeneous materials under an increasing external load. Breaking of a fiber in the model is preceded by a sequence of…
We derive an effective membrane theory in the thin film limit within a two phase material model for a specimen consisting of an elastic matrix and soft inclusions. The soft inclusions may lead to the formation of cracks within the elastic…
When twisting a strip of paper or acetate under high longitudinal tension, one observes, at some critical load, a buckling of the strip into a regular triangular pattern. Very similar triangular facets have recently been observed in…
Fracture in quasi-statically driven systems is studied by means of a discrete spring-block model. Developed from close comparison with desiccation experiments, it describes crack formation induced by friction on a substrate. The model…
Granular chain packings exhibit a striking emergent strain-stiffening behavior despite the individual looseness of the constitutive chains. Using indentation experiments on such assemblies, we measure an exponential increase in the…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
The wear volume is known to keep increasing during frictional processes, and Archard notably proposed a model to describe the probability of wear particle formation upon asperity collision in a two-body contact configuration. While this…
We used nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to study the shear deformation of metallic composites composed of alternating layers of Cu and Au. Our simulations reveal the formation of "vortices" or "swirls" if the bimaterial…
In this paper, we study the preferential stiffness and the crack-tip fields for an elastic porous solid of which material properties are dependent upon the density. Such a description is necessary to describe the failure that can be caused…
We study the existence of distinct failure regimes in a model for fracture in fibrous materials. We simulate a bundle of parallel fibers under uniaxial static load and observe two different failure regimes: a catastrophic and a slowly…
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…
As a granular material is compressed, the particles and forces within the system arrange to form complex heterogeneous structures. Force chains are a prime example and are thought to constrain bulk properties such as mechanical stability…
We develop a theoretical description of the topological disentanglement occurring when torus knots reach the ends of a semi-flexible polymer under tension. These include decays into simpler knots and total unknotting. The minimal number of…
We investigate the weakening of elastic materials through randomly distributed circles and cracks numerically and compare the results to predictions from homogenization theories. We find a good agreement for the case of randomly oriented…
The buckling of thin elastic sheets is a classic mechanical instability that occurs over a wide range of scales. In the extreme limit of atomically thin membranes like graphene, thermal fluctuations can dramatically modify such mechanical…
We address the role of the nature of material disorder in determining the roughness of cracks which grow by damage nucleation and coalescence ahead of the crack tip. We highlight the role of quenched and annealed disorders in relation to…
The classical variational approach to brittle fracture propagation does not distinguish between strain energy accumulation in tension versus compression and consequently results in physically unrealistic cracking under compression. A…
We report on the nucleation of bubbles on solids that are gently rubbed against each other in a liquid. The phenomenon is found to depend strongly on the material and roughness of the solid surfaces. For a given surface, temperature, and…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
We present experiments on the dynamic buckling and fragmentation of slender rods axially impacted by a projectile. By combining the results of Saint-Venant and elastic beam theory, we derive a preferred wavelength lambda for the buckling…