Related papers: Peeling from a patterned thin elastic film
We use experiments to study the dynamics of the healing of a blister, a localized bump in a thin elastic layer that is adhered to a soft substrate everywhere except at the bump. We create a blister by gently placing a glass cover slip on a…
Thin films or sheets subjected to external forces often undergo mechanical instability, leading to regular patterns of wrinkles, folds, and creases. As can be anticipated from the difficulty of flattening a curved globe, any natural…
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…
We investigate the dynamic fracture of a close-packed monolayer of particles, or particle raft, floating at a liquid-gas interface induced by the localised addition of surfactant. Unusually for a two-dimensional solid, our experiments show…
Substrate wettability alteration induced control over crack formation process in thin colloidal films has been addressed in the present study. Colloidal nanosuspension (53nm, mean particle diameter) droplets have been subjected to natural…
We examine theoretically and numerically fast propagation of a tensile crack along unidimensional strips with periodically evolving toughness. In such dynamic fracture regimes, crack front waves form and transport front disturbances along…
Soft adhesive contacts are ubiquitous in nature and are increasingly used in synthetic systems, such as flexible electronics and soft robots, due to their advantages over traditional joining techniques. While methods to study the failure of…
Through tridimensonal numerical simulations of crack propagating in material with an elastic moduli heterogeneity it is shown that the presence of a simple inclusion can affect dramatically the propagation of the crack. Both the presence of…
We study the interaction of two parallel rigid cylinders on the surface of a thin elastic film supported on a pool of liquid. The excess energy of the surface due to the curvature of the stretched film induces attraction of the cylinders…
It is shown how the combination of atomic deposition and nonlinear diffusion may lead, below a critical temperature, to the growth of nonuniform layers on a substrate. The dynamics of such a system is of the Cahn-Hilliard type, supplemented…
Microemulsion droplets (oil in water stabilized by a surfactant film) are progressively decorated with increasing amounts of poly ethylene- oxide (PEO) chains anchored in the film by the short aliphatic chain grafted at one end of the PEO…
A variational discrete element method is applied to simulate quasi-static crack propagation. Cracks are considered to propagate between the mesh cells through the mesh facets. The elastic behaviour is parametrized by the continuous…
On the basis of a previous theoretical approach to the plastic flow of highly refined materials, a physical explanation for diffusion bonding is essayed, which yields closed--form equations relating the bonding progress with time,…
We report on the spreading of triboelectrically charged glass particles on an oppositely charged surface of a plastic cylindrical container in the presence of a constant mechanical agitation. The particles spread via sticking, as a…
This is a technical note aiming at the re-examination of the phenomenon of the steady-state cracking in the two-layer system. The method of Suo and Hutchinson, as introduced in their 1989 paper, is followed. Our solution is compared with…
We show that the intermittent and self-similar fluctuations displayed by a slow crack during the propagation in a heterogeneous medium can be quantitatively described by an extension of a classical statistical model for fracture. The model…
The ability to synthesize and control two-dimensional (2D) crystals creates numerous opportunities for studying emergent states of matter and their novel functionalities. Freestanding films provide a particularly versatile platform for…
During plastic deformation, metals change shape while continuously becoming stronger. The microscopic origin of these processes lies in the proliferation and movement of line defects, dislocations, and the subsequent self-organisation and…
The known ground state of ultrathin smectic films confined to the surface of a sphere is described by four +1/2 defects assembled on a great circle and a director which follows geodesic lines. Using a simple perturbative approach we show…
We report experimental results on the rift formation between two freezing wax plates. The plates were pulled apart with constant velocity, while floating on the melt, in a way akin to the tectonic plates of the earth's crust. At slow…