Progressive damage and rupture in polymers

Abstract

Progressive damage, which eventually leads to failure, is ubiquitous in biological and synthetic polymers. The simplest case to consider is that of elastomeric materials, which can undergo large reversible deformations with negligible rate dependence. In this paper, we develop a theory for modeling progressive damage and rupture of such materials. We extend the phase-field method, which is widely used to describe the damage and fracture of brittle materials, to elastomeric materials undergoing large deformations. A central feature of our theory is the recognition that the free energy of elastomers is not entirely entropic in nature---there is also an energetic contribution from the deformation of the bonds in the chains. It is the energetic part in the free energy which is the driving force for progressive damage and fracture.

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Chain breaking in the statistical mechanical constitutive theory of polymer networks
• An Adaptive Quasi-Continuum Approach for Modeling Fracture in Networked Materials: Application to Modeling of Polymer Networks
• A statistical mechanics framework for polymer chain scission, based on the concepts of distorted bond potential and asymptotic matching
• A continuum electro-chemo-mechanical gradient theory coupled with damage: Application to Li-metal filament growth in all-solid-state batteries
• Experiment-informed finite-strain inverse design of spinodal metamaterials
• Freely jointed chain models with extensible links
• Physics and chemistry-based constitutive framework for thermo-chemically aged elastomer using phase-field approach
• Nonlinear Inclusion Theory with Application to the Growth and Morphogenesis of a Confined Body
• Stretching Response of a Polymer Chain with Deformable Bonds
• On modeling fracture of soft polymers
• Extreme resilience and dissipation in heterogeneous disordered materials
• A finite element implementation of a large deformation gradient-damage theory for fracture with Abaqus user material subroutines
• Bayesian inference and uncertainty quantification for modeling of body-centered-cubic single crystals
• Evaluation of mechanical and energy properties for the phase field modeling of failure