Fracture of soft elastic foam

Abstract eng:
Soft elastic foams, which consist of flexible and stretchable ligaments, exhibit extremely high fracture toughness. Comparing the cellular structure of elastic foams with the network structure of rubbery polymers, this paper proposes a scaling law for the fracture energy of soft elastic foam. A phase-field model for the fracture processes in soft elastic structures is developed to verify the scaling law. The numerical simulations in 2D foam structures of different unit-cell geometries agree with the scaling law very well. In addition, the dependences of the macroscopic fracture energy on geometric parameters such as the network connectivity and spatial orientation have also been revealed by the numerical results. To further enhance the fracture toughness, a type of soft foam structures with folded ligaments has been proposed and its effective fracture energy is one order of magnitude higher than the base material can be reached by using the soft foam structure.

• Export as: BibTeX | MARC | MARCXML | DC | EndNote | NLM | RefWorks
• Add to your basket