Fracture of a model cohesive granular material

TL;DR

This study investigates how the fracture toughness of a model cohesive granular material made of glass beads and polymer bridges can be tuned by adjusting the polymer's properties, revealing the underlying fracture mechanisms.

Contribution

It demonstrates that fracture energy scales with polymer bridge cross-sectional area and elucidates the microscopic failure processes in cohesive granular media.

Findings

Fracture energy scales linearly with bridge cross-sectional area.

Adjusting polymer cross-linking tunes fracture toughness over an order of magnitude.

Crack propagation involves adhesive failure of polymer bridges and microcracks near the failure plane.

Abstract

We study experimentally the fracture mechanisms of a model cohesive granular medium consisting of glass beads held together by solidified polymer bridges. The elastic response of this material can be controlled by changing the cross-linking of the polymer phase, for example. Here we show that its fracture toughness can be tuned over an order of magnitude by adjusting the stiffness and size of the polymer bridges. We extract a well-defined fracture energy from fracture testing under a range of material preparations. This energy is found to scale linearly with the cross-sectional area of the bridges. Finally, X-ray microcomputed tomography shows that crack propagation is driven by adhesive failure of about one polymer bridge per bead located at the interface, along with microcracks in the vicinity of the failure plane. Our findings provide insight to the fracture mechanisms of this model material, and the mechanical properties of disordered cohesive granular media in general.