Related papers: Why planar cracks fragment into echelon cracks
While cracking is a complex dynamics that involves material intrinsic properties like grain shape and size distribution, elastic properties of grain and cementing materials, and extrinsic properties of loading, in this work, the focus has…
Widespread processes in nature and technology are governed by the dynamical transition whereby a material in an initially solid-like state then yields plastically. Major unresolved questions concern whether any material will yield smoothly…
We discuss steady state crack growth in the spirit of a free boundary problem. It turns out that mode I and mode III situations are very different from each other: In particular, mode III exhibits a pronounced transition towards unstable…
Understanding the role played by the microstructure of materials on their macroscopic failure properties is an important challenge in solid mechanics. Indeed, when a crack propagates at a heterogeneous brittle interface, the front is…
In this paper, we'll answer several abstract, formal questions about the nature of crack growth and nucleation. Bringing a field theory point of view to fracture illuminates things in what I hope will be an entertaining way. Formally, what…
We study the stability and roughness of propagating cracks in heterogeneous brittle two-dimensional elastic materials. We begin by deriving an equation of motion describing the dynamics of such a crack in the framework of Linear Elastic…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
When fast cracks become unstable to microscopic branching (micro-branching), fracture no longer occurs in an effective 2D medium. We follow in-plane crack front dynamics via real-time measurements in brittle gels as micro-branching unfolds…
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…
The buckling instability of micro- and nanopillars can be an issue when designing intelligent miniaturized devices and characterizing composite materials reinforced with beam-like particles on the small-scale. Analytical modeling of the…
Fatigue crack growth is decisive for the design of thin-walled structures such as fuselage shells of air planes. The cold rolling process, used to produce the aluminium sheets this structure is made of, leads to anisotropic mechanical…
The nucleation and/or growth of cracks in elastic-brittle solids has been recently described in [14] in terms of a special class of measures and with a variational technique requiring the minimization of a certain energy over classes of…
Over the past seven years, full-field analyses of a wide range of classical as well as modern quasi-static fracture experiments on nominally elastic brittle materials -- ranging from hard ceramics to soft elastomers -- have repeatedly…
We investigate numerically the dynamics of crack propagation along a weak plane using a model consisting of fibers connecting a soft and a hard clamp. This bottom-up model has previously been shown to contain the competition of two crack…
Variational phase-field models of brittle fracture are powerful tools for studying Griffith-type crack propagation in complex scenarios. However, as approximations of Griffith's theory-which does not incorporate a strength criterion-these…
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…
A mathematical continuum limit of the interaction energy of a random particle chain is shown to yield new insight into the effect of microscopic heterogeneities on macroscopic fracture laws in brittle materials. We derive a formula which…
We study the genesis and the selective propagation of complex crack networks induced by thermal shock or drying of brittle materials. We use a quasi-static gradient damage model to perform large scale numerical simulations showing that the…
Failure in brittle materials under dynamic loading conditions is a result of the propagation and coalescence of microcracks. Simulating this mechanism at the continuum level is computationally expensive or, in some cases, intractable. The…
Griffith's energetic criterion, or `energy balance', has for a century formed the basis for fracture mechanics; the energy flowing into a crack front is precisely balanced by the dissipation (fracture energy) at the front. If the crack…