Related papers: Crack fronts and damage in glass at the nanometer …
We have studied the low speed fracture regime for different glassy materials with variable but controlled length scales of heterogeneity in a carefully mastered surrounding atmosphere. By using optical and atomic force (AFM) microscopy…
We report in situ Atomic Force Microscopy experiments which reveal the presence of nanoscale damage cavities ahead of a stress-corrosion crack tip in glass. Their presence might explain the departure from linear elasticity observed in the…
Ultimately, brittle fracture involves breaking atomic bonds. However, we still lack a clear picture of what happens in the highly deformed region around a moving crack tip. Consequently, we still cannot link nano to atomic-scale phenomena…
We studied the low speed fracture regime (0.1mm/s - 1nm/s) in different glassy materials (soda-lime glass, glass-ceramics) with variable but controlled length scale of heterogeneity. The chosen mechanical system enabled us to work in pure…
We perform fracture experiments on nanoscale phase separated glasses and measure crack surface roughness by atomic force microscopy. The ability of tuning the phase domain size by thermal treatment allows us to test thoroughly the…
An original setup combining a very stable loading stage, an atomic force microscope and an environmental chamber, allows to obtain very stable sub-critical fracture propagation in oxide glasses under controlled environment, and subsequently…
We use large-scale simulations to investigate the dynamic fracture of silica and sodium-silicate glasses under uniaxial tension. The stress-strain curves demonstrate that silica glass is brittle whereas the glasses rich in Na show…
We report here atomic force microscopy experiments designed to uncover the nature of failure mechanisms occuring within the process zone at the tip of a crack propagating into a silica glass specimen under stress corrosion. The crack…
Since crack propagation in oxide materials at low crack velocities is partly determined by chemical corrosion, proper knowledge of the crack tip chemistry is crucial for understanding fracture in these materials. Such knowledge can be…
The lifetime and performance of any engineering component, from nanoscale sensors to macroscopic structures, are strongly influenced by fracture processes. Fracture itself is a highly localized event; originating at the atomic scale by bond…
Fracture propagation is highly sensitive to the conditions at the crack tip. In heterogeneous materials, microscale obstacles can cause propagation instabilities. Macroscopic heterogeneities modify the stress field over scales larger than…
Fracture growth in a material is strongly influenced by the presence of inhomogeneities, which deviate crack trajectories from rectilinearity and deeply affect failure. Increasing crack tortuosity is connected to enhancement of fracture…
The propagation of an interfacial crack front through a weak plane of a transparent Plexiglas block has been studied experimentally. A stable crack in mode I was generated by loading the system by an imposed displacement. The local…
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…
Ever since the very first human-made knapped tools, the control of fracture propagation in brittle materials has been a vector of technological development. Nowadays, a broad range of applications relies on crack propagation control, from…
Understanding, predicting and eventually improving the resistance to fracture of silicate materials is of primary importance to design new glasses that would be tougher, while retaining their transparency. However, the atomic mechanism of…
Statistics and thermally activated dynamics of crack nucleation and propagation in a two-dimensional heterogeneous material containing quenched randomly distributed defects are studied theoretically. Using the generalized Griffith criterion…
Crack fronts deform due to heterogeneities, and inspecting these deformations can reveal local variations of material properties, and help predict out of plane damage. Current models neglect the influence of a finite dissipation…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…
Dynamic crack propagation drives catastrophic solid failures. In many amorphous brittle materials, sufficiently fast crack growth involves small-scale, high-frequency microcracking damage localized near the crack tip. The ultra-fast…