How super-tough gels break

Abstract

Fracture of highly stretched materials challenges our view of how things break. We directly visualize rupture of tough double-network (DN) gels at >50\% strain. During fracture, crack tip shapes obey a $x\sim y^{1.6}$ power-law, in contrast to the parabolic profile observed in low-strain cracks. A new length-scale $\ell$ emerges from the power-law; we show that $\ell$ scales directly with the stored elastic energy, and diverges when the crack velocity approaches the shear wave speed. Our results show that DN gels undergo brittle fracture, and provide a testing ground for large-strain fracture mechanics.

References in corpus (5)

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• Fracture of dual crosslink gels with permanent and transient crosslinks
• Weakly Nonlinear Theory of Dynamic Fracture
• Cracks in rubber under tension exceed the shear wave speed
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• The fracture of highly deformable soft materials: A tale of two length scales
• Crack tip kinematics reveal the cohesive zone structure in brittle hydrogel fracture
• How Material Heterogeneity Creates Rough Fractures
• Virtual Frame Technique: Ultrafast Imaging with Any Camera
• Analytical Expression for Fracture Profile in Viscoelastic Crack Propagation