Related papers: Elastic instability behind brittle fracture
Unstable growth of cracks (rough crack surface and crack branching) in dynamic fracture has long been observed in various materials. Until now, there was no universally agreed upon explanation for these instabilities. Here, we demonstrate…
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…
The two-dimensional oscillatory crack instability, experimentally observed in a class of brittle materials under strongly dynamic conditions, has been recently reproduced by a nonlinear phase-field fracture theory. Here we highlight the…
The dynamics of rapid brittle cracks is commonly studied in the framework of linear elastic fracture mechanics where nonlinearities are neglected. However, recent experimental and theoretical work demonstrated explicitly the importance of…
Crack growth is the basic mechanism leading to the failure of brittle materials. Engineering addresses this problem within the framework of continuum mechanics, which links deterministically the crack motion to the applied loading. Such an…
The failure of brittle solids involves, before macroscopic rupture, power-law distributed avalanches of local rupture events whereby microcracks nucleate and grow, which are also observed in for an elastic interface evolving in a…
This paper demonstrates that rapid fracture of ideal brittle lattices naturally involves phenomena long seen in experiment, but which have been hard to understand from a continuum point of view. These idealized models do not mimic realistic…
We investigate phase-field modeling of brittle fracture in a one-dimensional bar featuring a continuous variation of elastic and/or fracture properties along its axis. Our main goal is to quantitatively assess how the heterogeneity in…
Dislocation nucleation in homogeneous crystals initially unfolds as a linear symmetry-breaking elastic instability. In the absence of explicit nucleation centers, such instability develops simultaneously all over the crystal and due to the…
When branching is suppressed, rapid cracks undergo a dynamic instability from a straight to an oscillatory path at a critical velocity $v_c$. In a systematic experimental study using a wide range of different brittle materials, we first…
A thin flat rectangular plate supported on its edges and subjected to in-plane loading exhibits stable post-buckling behaviour. However, the introduction of a nonlinear (softening) elastic foundation may cause the response to become…
Mixed mode (I+III) loading induces segmented crack front \'echelon structures connected by steps. We study this instability in a highly deformable, strain-hardening material. We find that \'echelons develop beyond a finite, size-independent…
We study how the loading rate, specimen geometry and microstructural texture select the dynamics of a crack moving through an heterogeneous elastic material in the quasi-static approximation. We find a transition, fully controlled by two…
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…
A dynamic crack will travel in a straight path up to a material-dependent critical speed beyond which its path becomes erratic. Predicting this critical speed and discovering the origin of this instability are two outstanding problems in…
Experiments on quasistatic crack propagation in gelatin hydrogels reveal a new branching instability triggered by wetting the tip opening with a drop of aqueous solvent less viscous than the bulk one. We show that the emergence of unstable…
This work investigates the morphological stability of a soft body composed of two heavy elastic layers, attached to a rigid surface and subjected only to the bulk gravity force. Using theoretical and computational tools, we characterize the…
Fractures are a critical process in how materials wear, weaken, and fail whose unpredictable behavior can have dire consequences. While the behavior of smooth cracks in ideal materials is well understood, it is assumed that for real,…
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 onset of frictional sliding between contacting bodies under shear load is nucleated by the quasi-static growth of localized slip patches. After reaching a certain critical size, these patches become unstable and continue growing…