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Crack buckling in soft gels under compression

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Abstract

Recent interest in designing soft gels with high fracture toughness has called for simple and robust methods to test fracture behavior. The conventional method of applying tension to a gel sample suffers from a difficulty of sample gripping. In this paper, we study a possible fracture mechanism of soft gels under uni-axial compression. We show that the surfaces of a pre-existing crack, oriented parallel to the loading axis, can buckle at a critical compressive stress. This buckling instability can open the crack surfaces and create highly concentrated stress fields near the crack tip, which can lead to crack growth. We show that the onset of crack buckling can be deduced by a dimensional argument combined with an analysis to determine the critical compression needed to induce surface instabilities of an elastic half space. The critical compression for buckling was verified for a neo-Hookean material model using finite element simulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 14853, USA

    Rong Long

  2. Field of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 14850, USA

    Rong Long & Chung-Yuen Hui

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  1. Rong Long
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  2. Chung-Yuen Hui
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Correspondence to Chung-Yuen Hui.

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Long, R., Hui, CY. Crack buckling in soft gels under compression. Acta Mech Sin 28, 1098–1105 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-012-0130-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-012-0130-7

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