FRACTURE LABORATORY

@ Institut Jean le Rond d'Alembert

Understanding the mechanics and physics of fracture

While materials and devices achieve nowadays increasingly complex tasks, ensuring their durability and predicting their toughness is still a major challenge. These properties result from the complex interplay between the applied stress conditions at the macro scale and the material microstructure at the microscale, influenced by damage processes also taking place at the microstructure scale. Continuum Mechanics, that predicts the behavior of coarse-grained homogeneous media, clearly fails to bridge those length scales. In the fracture lab’, we enrich classical fracture mechanics theory with concepts issued from statistical physics. In our approach, macroscopic failure properties emerge from the collective response of a spatially and temporally complex damage field, where the interplay between stress redistribution following fracture events and the material disorder play a central role. Our models are tested and developed using experiments and simulations of model heterogeneous systems. The new concepts developed to describe the transition to failure in these systems is then applied for the rational design of structures and materials with new and improved failure properties.