2016/07/31 by Bavand Keshavarz, Thibaut Divoux, Sébastien Manneville +1 · 56 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Brittleness #Composite material #Constitutive equation #Dissipative system #Hydrogels: synthesis, properties, applications #Materials science #Nonlinear system #Physics #Polymer #Polysaccharides Composition and Applications #Stiffening #Thermodynamics #Viscoelasticity #biodegradable polymer synthesis and properties #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1021/acsmacrolett.7b00213
published in ACS Macro Letters 6(7), 663-667 (American Chemical Society) · 6 pages, 4 figures and 1 pages of supplemental materials
arxiv created 2017/01/05 · openalex publication_date 2017/06/12 · arxiv updated 2020/08/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Polymer gels behave as soft viscoelastic solids and exhibit a generic nonlinear mechanical response characterized by pronounced stiffening prior to irreversible failure, most often through macroscopic fractures. Here, we describe this scenario for a model protein gel using an integral constitutive equation built upon the linear and the nonlinear viscoelastic properties of the gel. We show that this formalism predicts quantitatively the gel mechanical response in shear start-up experiments, up to the onset of macroscopic failure. Moreover, we couple the computed stress response with Bailey’s durability criterion for brittle solids in order to predict the critical values of the stress σ c and strain γ c at failure. The excellent agreement between theory and experiments suggests that failure in this soft viscoelastic gel is a Markovian process and that Bailey’s failure criterion extends beyond hard materials such as metals, glasses, or minerals.