Related papers: Strain-stiffening elastomers fail from the edge
We study the relation between a threshold-force based model at the microscopic scale and mode I fracture at the macroscopic scale in a system of discrete interacting springs. Specifically, we idealize the contact between two surfaces as…
Since their initial standardizations in the 1930s and 1950s, the so-called four-point and three-point bending tests on unnotched beams have been embraced by practitioners as two popular methods to indirectly measure the tensile strength of…
To go beyond the simple model for the fold as two flexible surfaces or faces linked by a crease that behaves as an elastic hinge, we carefully shape and anneal a crease within a polymer sheet and study its mechanical response. First, we…
The lifetime and performance of any engineering component, from nanoscale sensors to macroscopic structures, are strongly influenced by fracture processes. Fracture itself is a highly localized event; originating at the atomic scale by bond…
Surface stress, also known as surface tension, is a fundamental material property of any interface. However, measurements of solid surface stress in traditional engineering materials, such as metals and oxides, have proven to be very…
Predicting crack trajectories in brittle solids remains an open challenge in fracture mechanics due to the non-local nature of crack propagation and the way cracks modify their surrounding medium. Here, we develop a framework for…
We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding…
When a block made of an elastomer is subjected to large shear, its surface remains flat. When a block of biological soft tissue is subjected to large shear, it is likely that its surface in the plane of shear will buckle (apparition of…
In this paper, we compute the roughness exponent zeta of a long-range elastic string, at the depinning threshold, in a random medium with high precision, using a numerical method which exploits the analytic structure of the problem…
In this paper we first obtain the order of stress singularity for a dynamically propagating self-affine fractal crack. We then show that there is always an upper bound to roughness, i.e. a propagating fractal crack reaches a terminal…
Roughness of driven elastic interfaces in random media is typically understood to be characterized by a single roughness exponent $\zeta$. We show that at the depinning threshold, due to symmetry breaking caused by the direction of the…
Conforming materials to rigid substrates with Gaussian curvature --- positive for spheres and negative for saddles --- has proven a versatile tool to guide the self-assembly of defects such as scars, pleats, folds, blisters, and liquid…
We study the effect of the sample thickness in planar crack front propagation in a disordered elastic medium using the random fuse model. We employ different loading conditions and we test their stability with respect to crack growth. We…
The break-up of a two-dimensional circular disc by normal and oblique impact on a hard frictionless plate is investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. The disc is composed of numerous unbreakable randomly shaped convex polygons…
The precise mechanisms underlying the failure of multi-phase materials may be strongly dependent on the material's microstructural morphology. Micromechanical modeling has provided much insight into this dependence, but uncertainties remain…
Shear cracks propagation is a basic dynamical process that mediates interfacial failure. We develop a general weakly nonlinear elastic theory of shear cracks and show that these experience tensile-mode crack tip deformation, including…
The material characterization of ultra-thin solid sheets, including two-dimensional materials like graphene, is often performed through indentation tests on a flake suspended over a hole in a substrate. While this `suspended indentation' is…
Over the past seven years, full-field analyses of a wide range of classical as well as modern quasi-static fracture experiments on nominally elastic brittle materials -- ranging from hard ceramics to soft elastomers -- have repeatedly…
Recently, the phase field method has been increasingly used for brittle fractures in soft materials like polymers, elastomers, and biological tissues. When considering finite deformations to account for the highly deformable nature of soft…
In this work, the finite elements method (FEM) is used to analyse the growth of fretting cracks. FEM can be favourably used to extract the stress intensity factors in mixed mode, a typical situation for cracks growing in the vicinity of a…