Related papers: Crosslinking degree variations enable programming …
We investigate the role of microstructural bridging on the fracture toughness of composite materials. To achieve this, a new computational framework is presented that integrates phase field fracture and cohesive zone models to simulate…
While most chemical bonds weaken under the action of mechanical force (called slip bond behavior), nature has developed bonds that do the opposite: their lifetime increases as force is applied. While such catch bonds have been studied quite…
Molecular dynamic simulation enables one to correlate the evolution of the micro-structure with anisotropic stress when a material is subject to strain. The anisotropic stress due to a constant strain-rate load in a cross-linked polymer is…
The propagation path of quasistatic cracks under monotonic loading is known to be strongly influenced by the anisotropy of the fracture energy in crystalline solids or engineered materials with a regular microstructure. Such cracks…
Frictional sliding along an interface between two identical isotropic elastic plates under impact shear loading is investigated experimentally and numerically. The plates are held together by a compressive stress and one plate is subject to…
Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
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…
Transient networks comprised of polymers connected by short-lived bonds are a common design theme for both biological and synthetic materials. Transient bonds can provide mechanical rigidity, while still allowing for visco-elastic flows on…
In this work, we extend the recently proposed adaptive phase field method to model fracture in orthotropic functionally graded materials (FGMs). A recovery type error indicator combined with quadtree decomposition is employed for adaptive…
Many new soft but tough rubbery materials have been recently discovered and new applications such as flexible prosthetics, stretchable electrodes or soft robotics continuously emerge. Yet, a credible multi-scale quantitative picture of…
The forces that mixtures of motorized and passive crosslinking proteins collectively generate between cytoskeletal filaments within our cells are the key drivers of active cellular mechanics. Despite their importance, a unified theory to…
Soft constituent materials endow biological composites, such as bone, dentin and nacre, with viscoelastic properties that may play an important role in their remarkable fracture resistance. In this paper we calculate the scaling properties…
Cracks in soft materials exhibit diverse dynamic patterns, involving straight, oscillation, branching, and supershear fracture. Here, we successfully reproduce these crack morphologies in a two-dimensional pre-strained fracture scenario and…
When two solids start rubbing together, frictional sliding initiates in the wake of slip fronts propagating along their surfaces in contact. This macroscopic rupture dynamics can be successfully mapped on the elastodynamics of a moving…
Fracture involves interaction across large and small length scales. With the application of enough stress or strain to a brittle material, atomistic scale bonds will break, leading to fracture of the macroscopic specimen. From the…
The anisotropy of wood within the radial-tangential (RT) growth plane has a major influence on the cracking behavior perpendicular to grain. Within the scope of this work, a two-dimensional discrete element model is developed, consisting of…
Extreme localization of damage in conventional brittle materials is the source of a host of undesirable effects. We show how artificially engineered metamaterials with all brittle constituents can be designed to ensure that every breakable…
We study a class of models for brittle fracture: elastic theory models which allow for cracks but not for plastic flow. We show that these models exhibit, at all finite temperatures, a transition to fracture under applied load similar to…
Fracture is a fundamental mechanism of materials failure. Propagating cracks can exhibit a rich dynamical behavior controlled by a subtle interplay between microscopic failure processes in the crack tip region and macroscopic elasticity. We…