Related papers: On modeling fracture of soft polymers
Fracture of materials with rate-dependent mechanical behaviour, e.g. polymers, is a highly complex process. For an adequate modelling, the coupling between rate-dependent stiffness, dissipative mechanisms present in the bulk material and…
Accurately predicting when and how materials fail is critical to designing safe, reliable structures, mechanical systems, and engineered components that operate under stress. Yet, fracture behavior remains difficult to model across the…
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…
We study the dependence of the fracture surface energy on the pulling velocity for nano-porous polypropylene (PP) sheets to find two components: the static and dynamic ones. We show that these terms can be interpreted respectively as…
Highly-deformable materials, from synthetic hydrogels to biological tissues, are becoming increasingly important from both fundamental and practical perspectives. Their mechanical behaviors, in particular the dynamics of crack propagation…
Theoretical analyses and experiments have been carried out to investigate fracture behavior of glassy polymers. Our birefringence measurements quantify the local stress buildup at cut tip during different stages of drawing. Based on…
Disorder and long-range interactions are two of the key components that make material failure an interesting playfield for the application of statistical mechanics. The cornerstone in this respect has been lattice models of the fracture in…
Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy…
Elastomeric materials display a complicated set of stretchability and fracture properties that strongly depend on the flaw size, which has long been of interest to engineers and materials scientists. Here, we combine experiments and…
Accurate prediction of the force required to puncture a soft material is critical in many fields like medical technology, food processing, and manufacturing. However, such a prediction strongly depends on our understanding of the complex…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…
The precise mechanisms underlying the failure of multi-phase materials may be strongly dependent on the material's microstructural morphology. Micromechanical modeling has provided much insight into this dependence, but uncertainties remain…
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…
Fracture toughness $K_{IC}$ plays an important role in materials design. Along with numerous experimental methods to measure fracture toughness of materials, its understanding and theoretical prediction is very important. However,…
Understanding fluctuation-induced breakages in polymers has important implications for basic and applied sciences. Here I present for the first time an analytical treatment of the thermal breakage problem of a semi-flexible polymer model…
This paper develops a damage model for unfilled cross-linked rubbers based on the concept of scission of polymer chains. The model is built up on the well-known Gent elastic potential complemented by a kinetic equation describing effects of…
This study investigated, experimentally and numerically, the fracturing behavior of thermoset polymer structures featuring cracks and sharp u-notches. It is shown that, even for cases in which the sharpness of the notch would suggest…
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 mechanics of single-chain stretching and rupture are central to understanding the resilience of biological polymers and designing strong and tough soft materials such as double-network gels and multi-network elastomers. In this work, we…
The fractocohesive length - the ratio between fracture toughness and work-to-fracture - provides a material-specific length scale that characterizes the size-dependent fracture behavior of pristine elastomers. However, its relevance to…