# Cutting soft materials: how material differences shape the response

## TL;DR

This paper studies how different soft materials respond when cut, revealing how material properties influence cutting behavior and providing insights for applications like surgery and food engineering.

## Contribution

The study introduces a unified framework combining experiments and computational modeling to explain soft material cutting mechanics.

## Key findings

- Material-dependent cutting behaviors include abrupt or smooth transitions from indentation to crack initiation.
- Adhesion and damping in cohesive forces dominate over Coulomb friction in cutting soft materials.
- The model captures distinct steady cutting regimes observed in experiments.

## Abstract

Cutting soft materials is a complex process governed by the interplay of bulk large deformation, interfacial soft fracture, and contact forces with the cutting tool. Existing experimental characterizations and numerical models often fail to capture the variety of observed cutting behaviors, especially the transition from indentation to cutting and the roles of dissipative mechanisms. Here, we combine novel experimental cutting tests on three representative materials—a soft hydrogel, an elastomer, and food materials—with a coupled computational model that integrates soft fracture, adhesion, and frictional interactions. Our experiments reveal material-dependent cutting behaviors, with abrupt or smooth transitions from indentation to crack initiation, followed by distinct steady cutting regimes. The computational model captures these behaviors and shows that adhesion and damping contributions in the cohesive forces dominate tangential stresses, while Coulomb friction plays a negligible role due to low contact pressures. Together, these results provide new mechanistic insights into the physics of soft cutting and offer a unified framework for soft cutting mechanics to guide the design of soft materials, cutting tools, and cutting protocols, with direct relevance to surgical dissection and the engineering of food textures optimized for mastication.