Related papers: On failure mechanisms and load-parallel cracking i…
Predicting the growth of large cracks in brittle materials is a fundamental unresolved problem in fracture mechanics. Under out-of-plane shear loading, an initially planar crack may fragment into multiple cracks, forming an echelon crack…
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…
Understanding and mitigating the failure of reinforced elastomers has been a long-standing challenge in many industrial applications. In an early attempt to shed light on the fundamental mechanisms of failure, Gent and Park presented a…
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…
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…
Brittle materials fail catastrophically. In consequence of their limited flaw-tolerance, failure occurs by localized fracture and is typically a dynamic process. Recently, experiments on epithelial cell monolayers have revealed that this…
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…
The failure of adhesive bondlines has been studied at the microscopic level via tensile tests. Stable crack propagation could be generated by means of samples with improved geometry, which made in-situ observations possible. The interaction…
Cavitation is a common damage mechanism in soft solids. Here, we study this using a phase-separation technique in stretched, elastic solids to controllably nucleate and grow small cavities by several orders of magnitude. The ability to make…
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…
Slow crack propagation in ductile, and in certain brittle materials, appears to take place via the nucleation of voids ahead of the crack tip due to plastic yields, followed by the coalescence of these voids. Post mortem analysis of the…
The properties of slow crack growth in brittle materials are analyzed both theoretically and experimentally. We propose a model based on a thermally activated rupture process. Considering a 2D spring network submitted to an external load…
The understanding of dynamic failure in amorphous materials via the propagation of free boundaries like cracks and voids must go beyond elasticity theory, since plasticity intervenes in a crucial and poorly understood manner near the moving…
Nearly three decades ago, the field of mechanics was cautioned of the obscure nature of cavitation processes in soft materials [Gent, A.N., 1990. Cavitation in rubber: a cautionary tale. Rubber Chemistry and Technology, 63(3)]. Since then,…
Cavitation in soft elastomers and adhesives is often viewed as an elastic instability, commonly tied to the study of incompressible solids. It is the first step prior to fibrillation and ultimate failure in adhesives. Building on the work…
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…
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…
We perform traction experiments on viscous liquids highly confined between parallel plates, a geometry known as the probe-tack test in the adhesion community. Direct observation during the experiment coupled to force measurement shows the…
Elastomers saturated with gas at high pressure suffer from cavity nucleation, inflation, and deflation upon rapid or explosive de-compression. Although this process often results in undetectable changes in appearance, it causes internal…
The failure of materials and interfaces is mediated by cracks, nearly singular dissipative structures that propagate at velocities approaching the speed of sound. Crack initiation and subsequent propagation -- the dynamic process of…