Extreme cavity expansion in soft solids: Damage without fracture

Hydraulically pumped cone fracture in brittle solids

An analysis of inner cone cracks in brittle solids subject to cyclic indentation in liquid is presented. These inner cone cracks, so named because they form well within the maximum contact circle, are postulated to be driven by a hydraulic pumping mechanism. Unlike their more traditional outer cone crack counterparts, inner cones do not appear in monotonic loading or even cyclic loading in the ...

Cavity Expansion Methods in Geomechanics

Lubrication of soft viscoelastic solids

Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse soft lubricated contacts by treating the solid walls as viscoelastic: soft materials are typically not purely elastic, but dissipate energy under dynamical loa...

Surface sulci in squeezed soft solids.

The squeezing of soft solids, the constrained growth of biological tissues, and the swelling of soft elastic solids such as gels can generate large compressive stresses at their surfaces. This causes the otherwise smooth surface of such a solid to become unstable when its stress exceeds a critical value. Previous analyses of the surface instability have assumed two-dimensional plane-strain cond...

Shear waves and shocks in soft solids.

We study the motion of a sphere falling through soft viscoelastic materials when the time scale of the motion is short compared to the elastic relaxation time of the material. We observe shocks generated by the passage of the sphere at Mach numbers greater than 1. The sphere can undergo oscillations before reaching a steady terminal speed, and we show that these oscillations have the same frequ...