Related papers: Cracking of submerged beds
Magic Sand, a hydrophobic toy granular material, is widely used in popular science instructions because of its non-intuitive mechanical properties. A detailed study of the failure of an underwater column of magic sand shows that these…
The drying of a colloidal dispersion can result in a gel phase defined as a porous matrix saturated in solvent. During the drying process, high mechanical stresses are generated. When these stresses exceed the strength of the material, they…
We study at the laboratory scale the rupture of thin floating sheets made of a brittle material under a wave-induced mechanical forcing. We show that the rupture occurs where the curvature is maximum and the break-up threshold strongly…
We report on the penetration of cylindrical projectiles dropped from rest into a dry, noncohesive granular medium. The cylinder length, diameter, density, and tip shape are all explicitly varied. For deep penetrations, as compared to the…
Injections of large volumes of water into tight shale reservoirs allows the extraction of oil and gas not previously accessible. This large volume "super" fracking induces damage that allows the oil and/or gas to flow to an extraction well.…
To better understand the mechanisms of fracture pattern development and fluid escape in low permeability rocks, we performed time-resolved in situ X-ray tomography imaging to investigate the processes that occur during the slow heating…
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…
Characterizing the interaction between water and microscopic defects is one of the long-standing challenges in understanding a broad range of cracking processes. Different physical aspects of microscopic events, driven or influenced by…
The impact of a hydrogel sphere onto a granular target results in both the deformation of the sphere and the formation of a prominent topographic feature known as impact crater on the granular surface. We investigate the crater formation…
When particles of a few tens of microns are spread on the surface of water, they aggregate under the action of capillary forces and form a thin floating membrane, a particle raft. In a tank with a raft made of graphite powder, we generate…
Differential shrinkage in particulate quasi-brittle materials causes microcracking which reduces durability in these materials by increasing their mass transport properties. A hydro-mechanical three-dimensional periodic network approach was…
The fracture mechanics was widely employed to explain the crack propagation in the deposition produced by drying colloidal suspension. However, more complex than conventional fracture, those cracks periodically distribute and make up a…
For decades, researchers worldwide have investigated phenomena related to natural, artificial oil leakages such as oil drop formation within water bodies, their rise, and oil slick evolution after they breach the water-air interface.…
Cracks in thin layers are influenced by what lies beneath them. From buried craters to crocodile skin, crack patterns are found over an enormous range of length scales. Regardless of absolute size, their substrates can dramatically…
We propose a model for the formation of drying cracks in a viscoplastic material. In this model, we observe that when an external force is applied to a viscoplastic material before drying, the material memorizes the effect of the force as a…
Soft surfaces impacted by liquid droplets trap more air underneath than their rigid counterpart. The extended lifetime of the air film not only facilitates bouncing behaviours of the impacting droplets but also increases the possibility of…
Material failure is mediated by the propagation of cracks, which in realistic 3D materials typically involve multiple coexisting fracture planes. Multiple fracture-plane interactions create poorly understood out-of-plane crack structures,…
Flow-induced aggregation of colloidal particles leads to aggregates with fairly high fractal dimension () which are directly responsible for the observed rheological properties of sheared dispersions. We address the problem of the decrease…
We investigate the impact of a free-falling water drop onto a granular layer. First, we constructed a phase diagram of crater shapes with two control parameters, impact speed and grain size. A low-speed impact makes a deeper cylindrical…
The consolidation of colloidal particles in drying colloidal dispersions is influenced by various factors such as particle size and shape, and inter-particle potential. The capillary pressure induced by the menisci, formed between the top…