Related papers: The crack pattern of indented cohesive granular me…
We present a molecular dynamics study of force patterns, tensile strength and crack formation in a cohesive granular model where the particles are subjected to swelling or shrinkage gradients. Non-uniform particle size change generates…
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…
When cracks form in a thin contracting layer, they sequentially break the layer into smaller and smaller pieces. A rectilinear crack pattern encodes information about the order of crack formation, as later cracks tend to intersect with…
We investigate the initiation of cracks in vertically freestanding water-saturated colloidal pillars constructed using a direct-write technique. Paradoxically, the cracks form during drying at the free end, far from the substrate, where the…
The invasion of air into porous systems in drying processes is often localized in soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions and granular pastes, and it typically develops in the form of cracks before ordinary drying begins. To…
Inspired by the observation that many naturally occurring adhesives arise as textured thin films, we consider the displacement controlled peeling of a flexible plate from an incision-patterned thin adhesive elastic layer. We find that crack…
Upon mechanical loading, granular materials yield and undergo plastic deformation. The nature of plastic deformation is essential for the development of the macroscopic constitutive models and the understanding of shear band formation.…
Experiments on a thin layer of cohesive wet granular matter under vertical vibrations reveal kink separated domains that collide with the container at different phases. Due to the strong cohesion arising from the formation of liquid bridges…
We investigate the formation of spiral crack patterns during the desiccation of thin layers of precipitates in contact with a substrate. This symmetry-breaking fracturing mode is found to arise naturally not from torsion forces, but from a…
The presence of interparticle cohesion can drastically change the behavior of granular materials. For instance, powders are challenging to handle, and one can make a sandcastle using wet grains. In this study, we report experimental results…
We study the appearance and evolution of an array of parallel cracks in a thin slab of material that is directionally dried, and show that the cracks penetrate the material uniformly if the drying front is sufficiently sharp. We also show…
A fascinating class of patterns, often encountered in nature as meandering cracks on rocks, dried-out fields and tectonic plates is produced by the fracture of solids. Here we report the observation and modeling of an unusual type of…
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…
Stress enhancement in the vicinity of brittle cracks makes the macro-scale failure properties extremely sensitive to the micro-scale material disorder. Therefore: (i) Fracturing systems often display a jerky dynamics, so-called crackling…
The pattern development of multiple cracks in extremely anisotropic solids such as bilayer or multilayer two-dimensional (2D) crystals contains rich physics, which, however, remains largely unexplored. We studied crack interaction across…
We study a theoretical model of mud cracks, that is, the fracture patterns resulting from the contraction with drying in a thin layer of a mixture of granules and water. In this model, we consider the slip on the bottom of this layer and…
We investigate the mechanical response of a compressed monolayer of large and dense particles at a liquid-fluid interface: a granular raft. Upon compression, rafts first wrinkle; then, as the confinement increases, the deformation localizes…
We study the nucleation and development of crack patterns in thin composite fibers under tension in this work. A fiber comprises an elastic core and an outer layer of a weaker brittle material. In recent tensile experiments on such…
We have studied shrinkage crack patterns which form when a thin layer of an alumina/water slurry dries. Both isotropic and directional drying were studied. The dynamics of the pattern formation process and the geometric properties of the…
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.…