Related papers: Velocity Fluctuations in Dynamical Fracture: the R…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
Predicting when rupture occurs or cracks progress is a major challenge in numerous elds of industrial, societal and geophysical importance. It remains largely unsolved: Stress enhancement at cracks and defects, indeed, makes the macroscale…
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of a crack front during the micro-instabilities taking place in heterogeneous materials between two successive equilibrium positions. We focus specifically on the spatio-temporal…
The analogy between frictional cracks, propagating along interfaces in frictional contact, and ordinary cracks in bulk materials is important in various fields. We consider a stress-controlled frictional crack propagating at a velocity…
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…
Cracks are the major vehicle for material failure, and often exhibit rather complex dynamics. The laws that govern their motion have remained an object of constant study for nearly a century. The simplest kind of dynamic crack is a single…
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…
The growth of cracks combines materials science, fracture mechanics, and statistical physics. The importance of fluctuations in the crack velocity is fundamental since it signals that the crack overcomes local barriers such as tough spots…
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…
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…
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…
The failure of frictional interfaces -- the process of frictional rupture -- is widely assumed to feature crack-like properties, with far-reaching implications for various disciplines, ranging from engineering tribology to earthquake…
A dynamic crack will travel in a straight path up to a material-dependent critical speed beyond which its path becomes erratic. Predicting this critical speed and discovering the origin of this instability are two outstanding problems in…
We approach the problem of heterogeneous dynamic fracture by considering spatiotemporal perturbations to planar crack fronts. Front propagation is governed by local energy balance between the elastic energy per unit area available to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We study how the loading rate, specimen geometry and microstructural texture select the dynamics of a crack moving through an heterogeneous elastic material in the quasi-static approximation. We find a transition, fully controlled by two…
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…