Mode I fracture of a biopolymer gel: rate-dependent dissipation and large deformations disentangled

Abstract

We have designed a new experimental setup able to investigate fracture of soft materials at small scales. At high crack velocity, where energy is mostly dissipated through viscoelastic processes, we observe an increasingly large high strain domain in the crack tip vicinity. Taking advantage of our ability to determine where linear elasticity breaks down, we derive a simple prediction for the evolution of the energy release rate with the crack velocity.

To be published in "Extreme Mechanics Letters"

References in corpus (2)

• Fracture of a biopolymer gel as a viscoplastic disentanglement process
• From thermally activated to viscosity controlled fracture of biopolymer hydrogels

Cited by in corpus (7)

• The fracture of highly deformable soft materials: A tale of two length scales
• Microscopic precursors of failure in soft matter
• Data-Driven Rate-Dependent Fracture Mechanics
• Rigidity percolation control of the brittle-ductile transition in disordered networks
• Brittle fracture of polymer transient 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