Related papers: Fracture energy of gels
The fracture energy of brittle materials rises with crack velocity, and this effect is typically attributed to surface roughening from path instabilities. Here we show, using molecular dynamics simulations of silica glass with a…
We have carried out systematic fracture experiments in a single edge notch geometry over a range of stretch rates on dual crosslink hydrogels made from polyvinyl alcohol chains chemically crosslinked with glutaraldehyde and physically…
We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain…
Fracture of highly stretched materials challenges our view of how things break. We directly visualize rupture of tough double-network (DN) gels at >50\% strain. During fracture, crack tip shapes obey a $x\sim y^{1.6}$ power-law, in contrast…
The resistance to fracture of reversible biopolymer hydrogels is an important control factor of the cutting/slicing and eating characteristics of food gels. It is also critical for their utilization in tissue engineering, for which…
We investigate dynamic fracture of heterogeneous materials experimentally by measuring displacement fields as a rupture propagates through a periodic array of obstacles of controlled fracture energy. Our measurements demonstrate the…
We report on rate-dependent fracture energy measurements over three decades of steady crack velocities in alginate and gelatin hydrogels. We evidence that, irrespective of gel thermo-reversibility, thermally activated "unzipping" of the…
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…
We explore the Mode I fracture toughness of a polymer gel containing a semi-infinite, growing crack. First, an expression is derived for the energy release rate within the linearized, small-strain setting. This expression reveals a crack…
Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy…
Fractoluminescence experiments are performed on two kinds of silicate glasses. All the light spectra collected during dynamic fracture reveal a black body radiator behaviour, which is interpreted as a crack velocity-dependent temperature…
The temporal evolution of mechanical energy and spatially-averaged crack speed are both monitored in slowly fracturing artificial rocks. Both signals display an irregular burst-like dynamics, with power-law distributed fluctuations spanning…
While of paramount importance in material science, the dynamics of cracks still lacks a complete physical explanation. The transition from their slow creep behavior to a fast propagation regime is a notable key, as it leads to full material…
The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical…
In this paper we first obtain the order of stress singularity for a dynamically propagating self-affine fractal crack. We then show that there is always an upper bound to roughness, i.e. a propagating fractal crack reaches a terminal…
A liquid droplet resting on a soft gel substrate can deform that substrate to the point of material failure, whereby fractures develop on the gel surface that propagate outwards from the contact-line in a starburst pattern. In this paper,…
Dynamic fracture experiments were performed in PMMA over a wide range of velocities and reveal that the fracture energy exhibits an abrupt 3-folds increase from its value at crack initiation at a well-defined critical velocity, below the…
Recently the scaling laws describing the roughness development of fracture surfaces was proposed to be related to the macroscopic elastic energy released during crack propagation [Mor00]. On this basis, an energy-based asymptotic analysis…
Dynamic fracture in a wide class of materials reveals "fracture energy" $\Gamma$ much larger than the expected nominal surface energy due to the formation of two fresh surfaces. Moreover, the fracture energy depends on the crack velocity,…
Experiments of pure tensile fracture in brittle gels reveal a new dynamic oscillatory instability whose onset occurs at a critical velocity, Vc = 0.87 Cs, where Cs is the shear wave speed. Until Vc crack dynamics are well described by…