Viscoelastic Fracture of Biological Composites

Abstract

Soft constituent materials endow biological composites, such as bone, dentin and nacre, with viscoelastic properties that may play an important role in their remarkable fracture resistance. In this paper we calculate the scaling properties of the quasi-static energy release rate and the viscoelastic contribution to the fracture energy of various biological composites, using both perturbative and non-perturbative approaches. We consider coarse-grained descriptions of three types of anisotropic structures: (i) Liquid-crystal-like composites (ii) Stratified composites (iii) Staggered composites, for different crack orientations. In addition, we briefly discuss the implications of anisotropy for fracture criteria. Our analysis highlights the dominant lengthscales and scaling properties of viscoelastic fracture of biological composites. It may be useful for evaluating crack velocity toughening effects and structure-dissipation relations in these materials.

18 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Why is nacre strong? II: remaining mechanical weakness for cracks propagating along the sheets
• Physical picture for fractures in stratified materials: viscoelastic effects in large cracks

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Mode I fracture of a biopolymer gel: rate-dependent dissipation and large deformations disentangled
• Rigidity percolation control of the brittle-ductile transition in disordered networks
• Stationary crack propagation in a two-dimensional visco-elastic network model
• Velocity jump in the crack propagation induced on a semi-crystalline polymer sheet by constant-speed stretching
• Visco- and plasto-elastic fracture of nano-porous polymer sheets