2018/07/30 by Chopin Julien, Julien Chopin, Aditya Bhaskar +5 · 25 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Adhesion, Friction, and Surface Interactions #Classical mechanics #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Dissipative system #Dynamics (music) #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Fracture (geology) #Fracture mechanics #Front (military) #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Inertia #Materials science #Mechanics #Meteorology #Obstacle #Physics #Statistical physics #Thermodynamics #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.121.235501
published in Physical Review Letters 121(23), 235501 (American Physical Society)
arxiv created 2018/07/30 · openalex publication_date 2018/12/07 · arxiv updated 2018/12/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate experimentally and theoretically the dynamics of a crack front during the microinstabilities taking place in heterogeneous materials between two successive equilibrium positions. We focus specifically on the spatiotemporal evolution of the front, as it relaxes to a straight configuration, after depinning from a single obstacle of controlled strength and size. We show that this depinning dynamics is not controlled by inertia, but instead by the rate dependency of the dissipative mechanisms taking place within the fracture process zone. This implies that the crack speed fluctuations around its average value vm can be predicted from an overdamped equation of motion (v-vm)/v0=[G-Gc(vm)]/Gc(vm) involving the characteristic material speed v0=Gc(vm)/Gc'(vm) that emerges from the variation of fracture energy with crack speed. Our findings pave the way to a quantitative description of the critical depinning dynamics of cracks in disordered solids and open up new perspectives for the prediction of the effective failure properties of heterogeneous materials.