Related papers: Polycrystallinity enhances stress build-up around …
When materials freeze, they often undergo damage due to ice growth. Although this damage is commonly ascribed to the volumetric expansion of water upon freezing, it is usually driven by suction of water towards growing ice crystals. The…
The freezing of water is one of the major causes of mechanical damage in materials during wintertime; surprisingly this happens even in situations where water only partially saturates the material so that the ice has room to grow. Here we…
It is widely known that freezing breaks soft, wet materials. However, the mechanism underlying this damage is still not clear. To understand this process, we freeze model, brittle hydrogel samples, while observing the growth of ice-filled…
Ice and snow have sometime been classified as a viscoelastic or viscoplastic mate- rial according to temperature, strain rate, pressure and time scale. Throughout experimental studies presented in the literature, it has been observed that…
A simple micromechanical model of polycrystalline materials is proposed, which enables us to swiftly produce grain-boundary-stress distributions induced by the uniform external loading (in the elastic strain regime). Such statistical…
The friction of a stationary moving skate on smooth ice is investigated, in particular in relation to the formation of a thin layer of water between skate and ice. It is found that the combination of ploughing and sliding gives a friction…
We describe a novel crystal growth instability that enhances the development of thin edges, promoting the formation of plate-like or hollow columnar morphologies. This instability arises when diffusion-limited growth is coupled with…
We present observations of the formation of plate-like snow crystals that provide evidence for an edge-enhancing crystal growth instability. This instability arises when the condensation coefficient describing the growth of an ice prism…
Thermomechanical processes such as fatigue and shock have been suggested to cause and contribute to rock breakdown on Earth, and on other planetary bodies, particularly airless bodies in the inner solar system. In this study, we modeled…
We describe observations of a novel hysteresis behavior in the growth of ice crystals under near-vacuum conditions. Above a threshold supersaturation, we find that the ice growth rate often exhibits a sudden increase that we attribute to an…
The generation of stress in a pore due to salt crystallization is generally analysed as a compressive stress generation mechanism using the concept of crystallization pressure. We report on a completely different stress generation…
Despite the large number of experiments demonstrating that grains in a metallic material can grow at room temperature due to applied mechanical load, the mechanisms and the driving forces responsible for mechanically induced grain…
Grain growth fundamentally shapes the microstructure of crystalline materials upon annealing, affecting their overall mechanical and functional properties. Recently, it has been rationalized that grain growth in polycrystals does not result…
Convective flows coupled with solidification or melting in water bodies play a major role in shaping geophysical landscapes. Particularly in relation to the global climate warming scenario, it is essential to be able to accurately quantify…
Temperature increase in saturated porous materials under undrained conditions leads to thermal pressurization of the pore fluid due to the discrepancy between the thermal expansion coefficients of the pore fluid and of the solid matrix.…
The effect of freezing on contact line motion is a scientific challenge in the understanding of the solidification of capillary flows. In this letter, we experimentally investigate the spreading and freezing of a water droplet on a cold…
The forces exerted by growing crystals on the surrounding materials play a major role in many geological processes, from diagenetic replacement to rock weathering and uplifting of rocks and soils. Although crystallization is a…
We describe an optical scattering study of grain boundary premelting in water ice. Ubiquitous long ranged attractive polarization forces act to suppress grain boundary melting whereas repulsive forces originating in screened Coulomb…
Thermal stability of nanocrystalline multilayer thin film is of paramount importance as the applications often involve high temperature. Here we report on the layer instability phenomenon in binary polycrystalline thin film initiating from…
Understanding the coupled dynamics of liquid-solid phase change and fluid flows is crucial in a wide range of geophysical and industrial applications. When freezing occurs in saline water, the newly formed ice is mushy, with a porous…