2012-05-23
15:45 at HCI G 7

How Things Break? – A Failure Story

Eran Bouchbinder

Weizmann Institute

Cracks are the major vehicle for material failure and often exhibit complex dynamics. In spite of the fact that the laws that govern their motion have been intensively investigated for nearly a century, several fundamental issues in dynamic fracture remain poorly understood. A major stumbling block in making progress in this problem is that it involves the coupling between widely separated scales; fast fracture, which is ultimately driven by the release of (linear) elastic energy slowly stored on large scales, is affected by the rapid, non-linear and dissipative processes taking place in the very small scales near the front of a moving crack. In this talk, I will describe some of the major challenges in this field and review recent experimental and theoretical advances, highlighting basic properties of the recently developed “Weakly Nonlinear Theory of Dynamic Fracture” and its success in explaining various experimental observations, including a high-speed crack instability.