Brittle materials propagate opening cracks under tension. When stress increases beyond a critical magnitude, then quasistatic crack propagation becomes unstable. In the presence of several precracks, a brittle material always propagates only the weakest crack, leading to catastrophic failure. Here, we show that all these features of brittle fracture are fundamentally modified when the material ...

CoSb3 based skutterudite thermoelectric material has superior thermoelectric properties, but the low fracture toughness prevents its widespread commercial application. To determine the origin of its brittle failure, we examined the response of shear deformation in CoSb3 along the most plausible slip system (010)/<100>, using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations. We find that the brittle f...

Meshfree Galerkin approximations in both two and three dimensions have been used in simulations of dynamic shear band propagation in an asymmetrically impact-loaded prenotched plate. Failure mode switching and failure mode transitions, which have been reported experimentally, are replicated in numerical computations. For intermediate impact speed (25 m=s < V 6 30 m=s), the numerical results sho...