Related papers: Mechanical Failure of a Small and Confined Solid
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…
In this work, we investigate the topological properties of knotted defects in smectic liquid crystals. Our story begins with screw dislocations, whose radial surface structure can be smoothly accommodated on $S^3$ for fibred knots by using…
Recent Monte Carlo simulation studies of a Lennard-Jones fluid confined to a mesoscopic slit-pore have reported evidence for ``critical depletion'' in the pore local number density near the liquid-vapour critical point. In this note we…
We predict the structural interaction of crystalline solid-melt interfaces using amplitude equations which are derived from classical density functional theory or phase-field-crystal modeling. The solid ordering decays exponentially on the…
Multi-phase materials are key for modern engineering applications. They are generally characterized by a high strength and ductility. Many of these materials fail by ductile fracture of the, generally softer, matrix phase. In this work we…
Crack nucleation is a ubiquitous phenomena during materials failure, because stress focuses on crack tips. It is known that exceptions to this general rule arise in the limit of strong disorder or vanishing mechanical stability, where…
We present detailed systematic studies of structural transformations in thin liquid crystal films with the smectic-C to hexatic phase transition. For the first time all possible structures reported in the literature are observed for one…
Amorphous solids increase their stress as a function of an applied strain until a mechanical yield point whereupon the stress cannot increase anymore, afterwards exhibiting a steady state with a constant mean stress. In stress controlled…
We investigate the fragmentation process of solid materials with crystalline and amorphous phases using the discrete element method. Damage initiates inside spherical samples above the contact zone in a region where the circumferential…
In weakest link models the failure of a single microscopic element of a brittle material causes the failure of an entire macroscopic specimen, just as a chain fails if one link fails. Pristine samples of glass, such as optical…
A numerical model able to simulate solid-state constrained sintering is presented. The model couples an existing kinetic Monte Carlo (kMC) model for free sintering with a finite element model (FEM) for calculating stresses on a…
In ordinary solids, material disorder is known to increase the size of the process zone in which stress concentrates at the crack tip, causing a transition from localized to diffuse failure. Here, we report experiments on disordered 2D…
Networks with only central force interactions are floppy when their average connectivity is below an isostatic threshold. Although such networks are mechanically unstable, they can become rigid when strained. It was recently shown that the…
Power law distributed fluctuations are known to accompany \emph{terminal} failure in disordered brittle solids. The associated intermittent scale-free behavior is of interest from the fundamental point of view as it emerges universally from…
Fracture processes in multi-phase solids are inherently complex due to multiple competing mechanisms. Here, we investigate the elastic and fracture behaviour of two-phase solids, comprising a fragile phase and a tough phase using a…
We investigate a behavior of a core-softened system in a thin slit pore (the width of the pore is equil to three diameters of the particles). In previous studies it was shown that strongly confined systems form crystalline phases which…
We investigate the gravitational fragmentation of expanding shells in the context of the linear thin--shell analysis. We make use of two very different numerical schemes; the FLASH Adaptive Mesh Refinement code and a version of the Benz…
We perform molecular dynamic (MD) simulations of frictional non-thermal particles driven by an externally applied shear stress. After the system jams following a transient flow, we probe its mechanical response in order to clarify whether…
In our previous paper (Eur. Phys. J. E 4, 121 (2001)) we proposed a coarse-grained elastic energy for nacre, or stratified structure of hard and soft layers. We then analyzed a crack running perpendicular to the layers and suggested one…
Disordered fiber networks exhibit a floppy to rigid mechanical phase transition as a function of connectivity. Sub-isostatically connected networks can undergo this transition via straining. Critical exponents governing this transition have…