Related papers: Cracking in polymer substrates for flexible device…
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…
Thermal welding of polymer-polymer interfaces is important for integrating polymeric elements into devices. When two different polymers are joined, the strength of the weld depends critically on the degree of immiscibility. We perform…
Mechanical metamaterials made of flexible building blocks can exhibit a plethora of extreme mechanical responses, such as negative elastic constants, shape-changes, programmability and memory. To date, dissipation has largely remained…
High-density polyethylene (HDPE) thin films, while inherently ductile, exhibit poor flaw tolerance. Our experiments show that they fail prematurely not at the point of maximum stretch, but at the boundary of a necked region or notch-tip…
The accurate measurement of fracture resistance in elastomers is essential for predicting the mechanical limits of soft devices. Usually, this is achieved by performing tearing or peeling experiments on thin-sheet samples. Here, we show…
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…
We investigate how material rigidity acts as a key control parameter for the failure of solids under stress. In both experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that material failure can be continuously tuned by varying the underlying…
The recent development of electric and electronic devices has been remarkable. The miniaturization of electronic devices and high integration are progressing by advances in mounting technology. As a result, the reliability of fatigue life…
Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…
I study numerically the problem of delamination of a thin film elastically attached to a rigid substrate. A nominally flat elastic thin film is modeled using a two-dimensional triangular mesh. Both compression and bending rigidities are…
Periodic wrinkling of a rigid capping layer on a deformable substrate provides a useful method for templating surface topography for a variety of novel applications. Many experiments have studied wrinkle formation during the compression of…
The results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of the friction at an interface between polymer melts and weakly attractive crystalline surfaces are reported. We consider a coarse-grained bead-spring model of linear chains with…
The formation of periodic wrinkles in soft layered materials due to mechanical instabilities is prevalent in nature and has been proposed for use in multiple applications. However, such phenomena have been explored predominantly in…
Rubber friction is of major practical importance in applications such as tires, rubber seals, and footwear. This review article focuses on the theory and experimental studies of rubber friction on substrates with random roughness. We…
Unstable growth of cracks (rough crack surface and crack branching) in dynamic fracture has long been observed in various materials. Until now, there was no universally agreed upon explanation for these instabilities. Here, we demonstrate…
The effective adhesive properties of heterogeneous thin films are characterized through a combined experimental and theoretical investigation. By bridging scales, we show how variations of elastic or adhesive properties at the microscale…
We investigate the cyclic mechanical behavior in uniaxial tension of three different commercial thermoplastic polyurethane elastomers (TPU) often considered as a sustainable replacement for common filled elastomers. All TPU have similar…
The stretchability of polymeric materials is critical to many applications such as stretchable electronics and soft robotics, yet the stretchability of conventional cross-linked linear polymers is limited by the entanglements between…
Magnetron sputtered titanium nitride (TiN) thin films are widely used as protective coatings due to their high hardness, but suffer from inherent brittleness and low fracture toughness, limiting their applicability. The multilayering of TiN…
Adhesive peeling of a thin elastic film from a substrate is a classic problem in mechanics. However, many of the investigations on this topic to date have focused on peeling from substrates with flat surfaces. In this paper, we study the…