English

Tunable failure: control of rupture through rigidity

Soft Condensed Matter 2017-09-26 v2

Abstract

We investigate how material rigidity acts as a key control parameter for the failure of solids under stress. In both experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that material failure can be continuously tuned by varying the underlying rigidity of the material while holding the amount of disorder constant. As the rigidity transition is approached, failure due to the application of uniaxial stress evolves from brittle cracking to system-spanning diffuse breaking. This evolution in failure behavior can be parameterized by the width of the crack. As a system becomes more and more floppy, this crack width increases until it saturates at the system size. Thus, the spatial extent of the failure zone can be used as a direct probe for material rigidity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.04227,
  title  = {Tunable failure: control of rupture through rigidity},
  author = {Michelle M. Driscoll and Bryan Gin-ge Chen and Thomas H. Beuman and Stephan Ulrich and Sidney R. Nagel and Vincenzo Vitelli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.04227},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:04:38.113Z