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Fracture limits the structural stability of macroscopic and microscopic materials, from beams and bones to microtubules and nanotubes. Despite recent progress, fracture control continues to present profound practical and theoretical…
Fracture growth in a material is strongly influenced by the presence of inhomogeneities, which deviate crack trajectories from rectilinearity and deeply affect failure. Increasing crack tortuosity is connected to enhancement of fracture…
Progressive damage, which eventually leads to failure, is ubiquitous in biological and synthetic polymers. The simplest case to consider is that of elastomeric materials, which can undergo large reversible deformations with negligible rate…
Modeling the propagation of cracks at the microscopic level is fundamental to understand the effect of the microstructure on the fracture process. Nevertheless, microscopic propagation is often unstable and when using phase field fracture…
A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We…
The possibility of tailoring the critical strain of 2D materials will be crucial for the fabrication of flexible devices. In this paper, the fracture in polycrystalline MoS2 films with two different grain orientations is studied at the…
Atomic-scale investigation on mechanical behaviors is highly necessary to fully understand the fracture mechanics especially of brittle materials, which are determined by atomic-scale phenomena (e.g., lattice trapping). Here, exfoliated…
Fracture phenomena in soft materials span multiple length- and timescales. This poses a major challenge in computational modeling and predictive materials design. To pass quantitatively from molecular- to continuum scales, a precise…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells has many types of crosslinkers. The mechanical interplay between these different crosslinker types is an open issue in cytoskeletal mechanics. We develop a framework to study the cooperativity and…
The interaction of crack fronts with asperities is central to the criteria of fracture in heterogeneous materials and for predicting fracture surface formation. It is known how dynamic crack fronts respond to small, 1st-order,…
Here, the general design and properties of new multiple network elastomers with an exceptional combination of stiffness, toughness, and elasticity are reported. In this paper, it is reported in more detail how the increase in strain at…
We study the phase behavior of random heteropolymers (RHPs) with quenched cross-links, a novel polymer class of technological and biological relevance, and show the possible occurrence of freezing with few chain conformations sampled. The…
Displacement flows are common in hydraulic fracturing, as fracking fluids of different composition are injected sequentially in the fracture. The injection of an immiscible fluid at the center of a liquid-filled fracture results in the…
While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material…
When injected through a contraction, high molecular weight polymer solutions exhibit a sharp increase of apparent viscosity which originates from stretching polymer chains above a critical extension rate. This chain stretching can also…
The strength of granular materials is highly dependent on grain connectivity (fabric), force transmission, and frictional mobilization at the particle scale. Furthermore, these bulk properties are strongly dependent on the geometry and…
Recently proposed phase-field models offer self-consistent descriptions of brittle fracture. Here, we analyze these theories in the quasistatic regime of crack propagation. We show how to derive the laws of crack motion either by using…
Peridynamics (PD) represents a new approach for modelling fracture mechanics, where a continuum domain is modelled through particles connected via physical bonds. This formulation allows us to model crack initiation, propagation, branching…
Materials with extreme mechanical anisotropy are designed to work near a material instability threshold where they display stress channelling and strain localization, effects that can be exploited in several technologies. Extreme couple…
Semiflexible polymers such as filamentous actin play a vital role in the mechanical behavior of cells, yet the basic properties of cross-linked F-actin networks remain poorly understood. To address this issue, we have performed numerical…