Related papers: Crack Tip Relaxation Governs Onset of Fracture Ins…
A dynamic crack tip equation of motion is proposed based on the autonomy of the near-tip nonlinear zone of scale $\ell_{nl}$, symmetry principles, causality and scaling arguments. Causality implies that the asymptotic linear-elastic fields…
This paper demonstrates that rapid fracture of ideal brittle lattices naturally involves phenomena long seen in experiment, but which have been hard to understand from a continuum point of view. These idealized models do not mimic realistic…
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…
A continuum model of fracture that describes, in principle, the propagation and interaction of arbitrary distributions of cracks and voids with evolving topology without a fracture criterion is developed. It involves a 'law of motion' for…
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…
We propose a theoretical model for branching instabilities in 2-dimensional fracture, offering predictions for when crack branching occurs, how multiple cracks develop, and what is the geometry of multiple branches. The model is based on…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
The dynamics and stability of brittle cracks are not yet fully understood. Here we use the Willis-Movchan 3D linear perturbation formalism [J. Mech. Phys. Solids {\bf 45}, 591 (1997)] to study the out-of-plane stability of planar crack…
The interaction of crack fronts with asperities is central to the criteria of fracture in heterogeneous materials and for predicting fracture surface formation. It is known how dynamic crack fronts respond to small, 1st-order,…
We propose a minimal nonlinear model of brittle crack propagation by considering only the motion of the crack-tip atom. The model captures many essential features of steady-state crack velocity and is in excellent quantitative agreement…
We discuss the stick-slip motion of an elastic block sliding along a rigid substrate. We argue that for a given external shear stress this system shows a discontinuous nonequilibrium transition from a uniform stick state to uniform sliding…
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…
Predicting crack trajectories in brittle solids remains an open challenge in fracture mechanics due to the non-local nature of crack propagation and the way cracks modify their surrounding medium. Here, we develop a framework for…
A newly developed sharp interface model describes crack propagation by a phase transition process. We solve this free boundary problem numerically and obtain steady state solutions with a self-consistently selected propagation velocity and…
We argue that nucleation of brittle cracks in initially flawless soft elastic solids is preceded by a nonlinear elastic instability, which cannot be captured without accounting for geometrical precise description of finite elastic…
We address the velocity fluctuations of fastly moving cracks in stressed materials. One possible mechanism for such fluctuations is the interaction of the main crack with micro cracks (irrespective whether these are existing material…