Abstract:

Material failure is mediated by the propagation of cracks which, in realistic 3D materials, typically involves multiple coexisting fracture planes. Multiple fracture-plane interactions create poorly understood out-of-plane crack structures, such as step defects on tensile fracture surfaces. Steps form once a slowly moving, distorted crack front segments into disconnected overlapping fracture planes separated by a stabilizing distance hmax. Our experiments on numerous brittle hydrogels reveal that hmax varies linearly with both a nonlinear elastic length and a dissipation length. Here, is the measured crack velocity dependent fracture energy, and is the shear modulus.

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