cohesive zone

Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy cooperates with mechanical dissipation in process zone to give high fracture toughness of soft materials is not well understood. In addition, it is still challenging to predict fracture energies and crack-tip strain fields of soft tough materials.

A detailed report of our work on trying to find cohesive laws for interfacial fracture is attached.  I will add the experimental data after a shorter version of this report has been published.

The reason for posting this report on iMechanica is so that people who want to replicate the tests or perform similar tests know what is involved.  As we have found out, many details and potential problems faced by an experimentalist are hard to determine from the concise papers that are typically published as journal articles.

Hi all,

I am conducting some cohesive crack simulations within the framework of XFEM. The cohesive model is an initially rigid traction-separation law for mode I.  In order to deal with negative values of the normal sepration/jump, I use a penalty stiffness K.

Hi,