Related papers: Pattern selection of cracks in directionally dryin…
While the hydraulic fracturing technology, aka fracking (or fraccing, frac), has become highly developed and astonishingly successful, a consistent formulation of the associated fracture mechanics that would not conflict with some…
We study the interaction between two cracks propagating quasistatically during the tearing of a thin brittle sheet. We show that the cracks attract each other following a path described by a power law resulting from the competition between…
The problem of finding what direction cracks should move is not completely solved. A commonly accepted way to predict crack directions is by computing the density of elastic potential energy stored well away from the crack tip, and finding…
A deposited drop of bovine serum albumin salt solution experiences both gelation and fracturation during evaporation. The cracks appearing at the edge of the gelling drop are regularly spaced, due to the competition between the…
Experiments involving vibrating pastes before drying were performed for the purposes of controlling the crack patterns that appear in the drying process. These experiments revealed a transition in the direction of lamellar cracks from…
Predicting the growth of large cracks in brittle materials is a fundamental unresolved problem in fracture mechanics. Under out-of-plane shear loading, an initially planar crack may fragment into multiple cracks, forming an echelon crack…
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…
A continuum model of crack propagation is presented and discussed. We obtain steady state solutions with a self-consistently selected propagation velocity and shape of the crack, provided that elastodynamic and viscoelastic effects are…
We review microstructural fracture growth models suitable for the study of hydraulic fracture processes in disordered porous materials and present some basic results. It is shown that microstructural models exhibit certain similarities to…
Polygonal desiccation crack patterns are commonly observed in natural systems. Despite their quotidian nature, it is unclear whether similar crack patterns which span orders of magnitude in length scales share the same underlying physics.…
Starch-water slurries are commonly used to study fracture dynamics. Drying starch-cakes benefit from being simple, economical, and reproducible systems, and have been used to model desiccation fracture in soils, thin film fracture in paint,…
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…
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…
The slow motion of a crack line is studied via an experiment in which sheets of paper are split into two halves in a ``peel-in-nip'' (PIN) geometry under a constant load, in creep. The velocity-force relation is exponential. The dynamics of…
Material failure is mediated by the propagation of cracks, which in realistic 3D materials typically involve multiple coexisting fracture planes. Multiple fracture-plane interactions create poorly understood out-of-plane crack structures,…
A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We…
The phenomenon of arrest of an unstably-growing crack due to a curved weak interface is investigated. The weak interface can produce the deviation of the crack path, trapping the crack at the interface, leading to stable crack growth for…
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…
As a consequence of shearing, wing cracks can emerge from pre-existing fractures. The process involves the interaction of sliding of the existing fracture surfaces and the tensile material failure that creates wing cracks. This work devises…
We study numerically the growth of a crack in an elastic medium under the influence of a travelling shockwave. We describe the implementation of a fast algorithm which is perfectly suited for a data parallel computer. Using large scale…