Related papers: Why planar cracks fragment into echelon cracks
Crack advance from short or long pre-cracks is predicted by the progressive failure of a cohesive zone in a strain gradient, elasto-plastic solid. The presence of strain gradients leads to the existence of an elastic zone at the tip of a…
We study the brittle fragmentation of spheres by using a three-dimensional Discrete Element Model. Large scale computer simulations are performed with a model that consists of agglomerates of many particles, interconnected by beam-truss…
We report results on the interrelation between driving force, roughness exponent, branching and crack speed in a finite element model. We show that for low applied loadings the crack speed reaches the values measured in the experiments, and…
Recently proposed phase-field models offer self-consistent descriptions of brittle fracture. Here, we analyze these theories in the quasistatic regime of crack propagation. We show how to derive the laws of crack motion either by using…
Shear cracks propagation is a basic dynamical process that mediates interfacial failure. We develop a general weakly nonlinear elastic theory of shear cracks and show that these experience tensile-mode crack tip deformation, including…
A force balance condition to predict quasistatic crack paths in anisotropic brittle materials is derived from an analysis of diffuse interface continuum models that describe both short-scale failure inside a microscopic process zone and…
This paper presents a formulation for brittle fracture in 3D elastic solids within the context of configurational mechanics. The local form of the first law of thermodynamics provides a condition for equilibrium of the crack front. The…
For solving the longstanding materials science problem of correlating elastic properties of a solid material to the formation of cracks we present a new general concept. This concept is applied to the technologically most important cracks…
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 most important characteristics of the fragmentation of heterogeneous solids is that the mass (size) distribution of pieces is described by a power law functional form. The exponent of the distribution displays a high degree of…
In a previous paper (Leblond et al., 2011), we proposed a theoretical interpretation of the experimentally well known instability of coplanar crack propagation in mode I+III. The interpretation relied on a stability analysis based on…
We study a class of models for brittle fracture: elastic theory models which allow for cracks but not for plastic flow. We show that these models exhibit, at all finite temperatures, a transition to fracture under applied load similar to…
Crack initiation and propagation in elastic - perfectly plastic bodies is studied in a phase-field or variational gradient damage formulation. A rate-independent formulation that naturally couples elasticity, perfect plasticity and fracture…
Analytic relations that describe crack growth are vital for modeling experiments and building a theoretical understanding of fracture. Upon constructing an idealized model system for the crack and applying the principles of statistical…
A novel variational framework to model the fatigue behavior of brittle materials based on a phase-field approach to fracture is presented. The standard regularized free energy functional is modified introducing a fatigue degradation…
The dynamics and stability of brittle cracks are not yet fully understood. Here we use the Willis-Movchan 3D linear perturbation formalism [J. Mech. Phys. Solids {\bf 45}, 591 (1997)] to study the out-of-plane stability of planar crack…
Predicting potential risks associated with the fatigue of key structural components is crucial in engineering design. However, fatigue often involves entangled complexities of material microstructures and service conditions, making…
Fracture in quasi-statically driven systems is studied by means of a discrete spring-block model. Developed from close comparison with desiccation experiments, it describes crack formation induced by friction on a substrate. The model…
Growth-induced instabilities are ubiquitous in biological systems and lead to diverse morphologies in the form of wrinkling, folding, and creasing. The current work focusses on the mechanics behind growth-induced wrinkling instabilities in…
Slow crack growth in a model of homogenous brittle elastic material is described as a thermal activation process where stress fluctuations allow to overcome a breaking threshold through a series of irreversible steps. We study the case of a…