Yunwei Mao, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Brandon Talamini, Sandia National Laboratories

Shenghua Wu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The continuing revolution in the development of soft materials is transforming the engineering of devices. In many applications, harnessing the potential of soft materials hinges on whether mechanical failure can be prevented or controlled. In contrast to hard materials, in soft devices the length scale of fracture-type processes is often comparable to the structural dimensions, and thus fracture cannot be decoupled from the rest of the response. Additionally, the presence of competing dissipation mechanisms, e.g., the Mullins effect, viscous flow, solvent diffusion, formation and breaking of temporary bonds complicate the picture, but also provide opportunities to tailor toughness in new ways.

Analyzing these phenomena requires the development of new modeling and computational approaches and techniques. This session will focus on failure mechanisms in soft materials, encompassing experimental techniques to characterize, prevent or control failure in soft materials, and modeling efforts to understand failure mechanisms through theoretical and numerical techniques.

Keywords: material systems, solids and structures