Tunable failure: control of rupture through rigidity

TL;DR

This study shows that material failure modes can be continuously tuned by adjusting rigidity, transitioning from brittle cracks to diffuse failure as the material becomes more floppy, with crack width serving as a key indicator.

Contribution

It demonstrates experimentally and through simulations that material failure behavior can be controlled via rigidity, revealing a transition from brittle to diffuse failure modes.

Findings

Failure mode shifts from brittle to diffuse with decreasing rigidity

Crack width increases with decreasing rigidity and saturates at system size

Crack width can be used as a measure of material rigidity

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.