Related papers: Strain-stiffening elastomers fail from the edge
Elastomeric materials display a complicated set of stretchability and fracture properties that strongly depend on the flaw size, which has long been of interest to engineers and materials scientists. Here, we combine experiments and…
Soft polymers are ubiquitous materials in nature and as engineering materials with properties varying from rate-independent to rate-dependent. Current fracture toughness measures are non-unique for rate-dependent soft materials for varying…
Guided by recent advances in the understanding of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastic brittle materials, this paper proposes a suite of three simple experiments that permit the measurement of the three macroscopic material…
Using a multi-resolution technique, we analyze large in-plane fracture fronts moving slowly between two sintered Plexiglas plates. We find that the roughness of the front exhibits two distinct regimes separated by a crossover length scale…
Highly-deformable materials, from synthetic hydrogels to biological tissues, are becoming increasingly important from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Their mechanical behaviors, in particular the dynamics of crack propagation…
Compression-induced buckling instability of metal thin films on a compliant base result in surface wrinkles. A stiff thin film, perfectly bonded to an infinitely deep pre-stretched dielectric elastomer (DE) substrate, is considered. Linear…
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…
We examine the fracture mechanics of tearing graphene. We present a molecular dynamics simulation of the propagation of cracks in clamped, free-standing graphene as a function of the out-of-plane force. The geometry is motivated by…
Based on spatial-temporal resolved measurements of the stress field at crack tip based on polarized optical microscopy (str-POM), the stress analysis approach to elastomeric fracture uncovers new insights. We show new phenomenology in…
The shear strength of a pre-cracked sandwich layer is predicted, assuming that the layer is linear elastic or elastic-plastic, with yielding characterized by either J2 plasticity theory or by a strip-yield model. The substrates are elastic…
We study the effects realistic fracture criteria have on crack morphology obtained in numerical simulations with a stochastic discrete element method. Results are obtained with two criteria which are consistent with the theory of elasticity…
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…
We study theoretically the edge fracture instability in sheared complex fluids, by means of linear stability analysis and direct nonlinear simulations. We derive an exact analytical expression for the onset of edge fracture in terms of the…
This paper investigates the effects of plasticity on the effective fracture toughness. A layered material is considered as a modelling system. An elastic-plastic phase-field model and a surfing boundary condition are used to study how the…
We introduce a model of fracture which includes the out-of-plane degrees of freedom necessary to describe buckling in a thin-sheet material. The model is a regular square lattice of elastic beams, rigidly connected at the nodes so as to…
The rise of soft materials and additive manufacturing has provided the feasibility of developing elastomer lattices for various engineering applications. Although earlier attempts have been made to manufacture and test the elastomer…
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
We perform a detailed theoretical study of the edge fracture instability, which commonly destabilises the fluid-air interface during strong shear flows of entangled polymeric fluids, leading to unreliable rheological measurements. By means…
We consider an alternative way of obtaining the effective elastic properties of a cracked medium. Similarly, to the popular linear-slip model, we assume flat, parallel fractures, and long wavelengths. However, we do not treat fractures as…
Surface roughness plays a crucial role in the accuracy of indentation experiments used to measure the elastic properties of materials. In this study, we present a computational analysis of how surface roughness, represented explicitly by…