Predicting fracture energies and crack-tip fields of soft tough materials
By Teng Zhang, Shaoting Lin, Hyunwoo Yuk, Xuanhe Zhao. 2015
165 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy cooperates with mechanical dissipation in process zone to give high fracture toughness of soft materials is not well understood. In addition, it is still challenging to predict fracture energies and crack-tip strain fields of soft tough materials. Here, we report a scaling theory that accounts for synergistic effects of intrinsic fracture energies and dissipation on the toughening of soft materials. We then develop a coupled cohesive-zone and Mullins-effect model capable of quantitatively predicting fracture energies of soft tough materials and strain fields around crack tips in soft materials under large deformation. The theory and model are quantitatively validated by experiments on fracture of soft tough materials under large deformations. We further provide a general toughening diagram that can guide the design of new soft tough materials.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Computational Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1150d40619fb1723825a13c04833dfdb2217632b
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Computational Mechanics
In Mechanics of Materials
Citations in the corpus
- 50th Anniversary Perspective: Networks and Gels: Soft but Dynamic and Tough (2017, background): “A good comparison and a detailed discussion of these models, which differ in the hypotheses made to estimate the strain energy, has been recently published in a recent review by Long and Hui.30 Based on the existence of a damage zone at the crack tip, Zhang et al.31 also proposed a finite element mo”
- Fatigue fracture of tough hydrogels (2017, background): “In particular, the Mullins effect has been considered as the major factor to explain the softening of double network hydrogels over consecutive loading cycles [48-54], and has been attributed to progressive damage of the polymer networks [50, 55].”