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.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 10813-10817 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 113 |
Issue number | 39 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 27 2016 |
Funding
We acknowledge inspiring interactions with L. Mahadevan and Nitin Upadhyaya in the initial stages of this project. We thank Carl Goodrich, Andrea Liu, Michael Marder, and Jim Sethna for many fruitful discussions. Use of facilities at the University of Chicago National Science Foundation (NSF) Materials Research Science and Engineering Center are gratefully acknowledged. The work of M.M.D. and S.R.N. was supported by NSF Grant DMR-1404841. B.G.-g.C., T.H.B., and S.U. thank the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter and Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research for financial support.
Keywords
- Cracks
- Failure
- Glasses
- Jamming
- Metamaterials
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General