Related papers: Pinning of crack fronts by hard and soft inclusion…
Understanding the role played by the microstructure of materials on their macroscopic failure properties is an important challenge in solid mechanics. Indeed, when a crack propagates at a heterogeneous brittle interface, the front is…
The propagation of (planar) cracks in a heterogeneous brittle material characterized by a random field of toughness is considered, taking into account explicitly the effect of the crack front roughness on the local stress intensity factor.…
The paper addresses the problem of a Mode III interfacial crack advancing quasi-statically in a heterogeneous composite material, that is a two-phase material containing elastic inclusions, both soft and stiff, and defects, such as…
We investigate numerically the dynamics of crack propagation along a weak plane using a model consisting of fibers connecting a soft and a hard clamp. This bottom-up model has previously been shown to contain the competition of two crack…
When a crack interacts with material heterogeneities, its front distorts and adopts complex tortuous configurations that are reminiscent of the energy barriers encountered during crack propagation. As such, the study of crack front…
The propagation of a 3D crack in an heterogeneous material is studied using a phase field model. It is shown that in the case of randomly distributed inclusions of soft material in a matrix, the nature of the distribution has little effect…
Brittle solids are often toughened by adding a second-phase material. This practice often results in composites with material heterogeneities on the meso scale: large compared to the scale of the process zone but small compared to that of…
The dynamics of a single crack moving through a heterogeneous medium is studied in the quasi-static approximation. Equations of motion for the crack front are formulated and the resulting scaling behaviour analyzed. In a model scalar system…
Adhesion hysteresis can be caused by elastic instabilities that are triggered by surface roughness or chemical heterogeneity. However, the role of these instabilities in adhesion hysteresis remains poorly understood because we lack…
We investigate the process of slow intergranular crack propagation by the finite element method model, and show that branching is induced by partial arresting of crack front owing to the geometrical randomness of grain boundaries. A…
The modeling of crack propagation in a heterogeneous material using a phase field model is studied numerically in a simple test case: the crack meets a wedge of higher fracture energy. It is shown that when the crack cannot enter the wedge,…
The dynamics of planar crack fronts in heterogeneous media is studied using a recently proposed stochastic equation of motion that takes into account nonlinear effects. The analysis is carried for a moving front in the quasi-static regime…
Crack initiation and propagation in elastic - perfectly plastic bodies is studied in a phase-field or variational gradient damage formulation. A rate-independent formulation that naturally couples elasticity, perfect plasticity and fracture…
We present a simple example of toughening mechanism in the homogenization of composites with soft inclusions, produced by crack deflection at microscopic level. We show that the mechanism is connected to the irreversibility of the crack…
The shape of a crack front propagating through a thin sample is studied using a phase field model. The model is shown to have a well defined sharp interface limit. The crack front is found to be an ellipse with large axis the width of the…
We study the genesis and the selective propagation of complex crack networks induced by thermal shock or drying of brittle materials. We use a quasi-static gradient damage model to perform large scale numerical simulations showing that the…
Various kinds of heterogeneity in solids including atomistic discreteness affect the fracture strength as well as the failure dynamics remarkably. Here we study the effects of an initial crack in a discrete model for fracture in…
A phase field model of a crack front propagating in a three dimensional brittle material is used to study the fractographic patterns induced by the branching instability. The numerical results of this model give rise to crack surfaces that…
In this study, the crack propagation of the pre-cracked mono-crystal nickel with the voids and inclusions has been investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Different sizes of voids, inclusions and materials of inclusions are used to…
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…