From Brittle to Ductile Fracture in Disordered Materials

Abstract

We introduce a lattice model able to describe damage and yielding in heterogeneous materials ranging from brittle to ductile ones. Ductile fracture surfaces, obtained when the system breaks once the strain is completely localized, are shown to correspond to minimum energy surfaces. The similarity of the resulting fracture paths to the limits of brittle fracture or minimum energy surfaces is quantified. The model exhibits a smooth transition from brittleness to ductility, also present in how much plastic deformation is accumulated prior to fracture. The dynamics of yielding exhibits avalanches with a power-law distribution.

Avalanche localization and crossover scaling in amorphous plasticity

“…This paper is organized as follows. First, we examine the strain avalanches of the system away from criticality, and find that, depending on the short-range part of the interaction kernel, the model can exhibit a nonuniversal crossover from mean-field behavior at small stresses to nonmean-field behavior, similar to that observed in a lattice model for ductile fracture [29]. We then examine the nonmean-field behavior at criticality in greater depth, and present evidence that it is indeed universal, depending only on the large-scale nature of interactions.…”

The fracture of bulk metallic glasses

“…In contrary, the modeling and simulations can provide important information and details on the fracture process and mechanism, especially in the atomic scale process, which is not accessible by the current experimental instruments and methods. In parallel with the experimental studies, there are also many theoretical model and simulation efforts on the fracture process of BMGs [27,[29][30][31]179,250,269,270]. The studies involve in a large different scales from continuous modeling to atomistic simulations, and make up an important portion in understanding the fracture mechanism and macroscopic mechanical behaviors of BMGs and other glassy materials.…”

Brittle-to-ductile transition in a fiber bundle with strong heterogeneity

“…This widely different strength of the components combined with appropriate coupling results in an improved damage tolerance which has a high relevance for applications [20,21]. It has been shown that in heterogeneous materials, varying the local mechanical response and of the amount of disorder of the components one * ferenc.kun@science.unideb.hu can achieve a transition from brittle to quasibrittle or even to ductile failure [22][23][24][25].…”