Understanding the failure of soft materials under stress is crucial for addressing a wide range of engineering challenges, from pharmaceutical technology to landslide prevention.
A recent study has revealed a connection between various behaviors of soft materials that were previously thought to be unrelated. This discovery has led to the identification of a new parameter known as the brittility factor, which allows for a simplified understanding of soft material failure behavior. The implications of this finding are significant, as it will enable engineers to develop superior materials that can effectively meet the demands of the future.
Simon Rogers, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, along with graduate student Krutarth Kamani, has been instrumental in exploring how soft materials respond to stress. Their work has demonstrated the coexistence of solid and liquid physical states within the same material, shedding light on an area of great interest due to its relevance in industrial, environmental, and biomedical applications.
The team has discovered a significant communication breakdown among scientists working in this field, leading to a bottleneck between the theoretical understanding of soft material behavior and its real-world applications.
Soft materials, whether natural or synthetic, undergo deformation under pressure, eventually reaching a critical point where they either return to their original form or undergo permanent deformation, such as stretching or breaking like a piece of elastic. This critical process is known as yielding. Researchers have distinguished between a gradual yielding transition, known as ductile behavior, and an abrupt one, referred to as brittle behavior.
“At a recent conference, we realized that all of us who study soft materials from all over Europe and North America couldn’t agree on the connection between brittle and ductile behavior nor how to define it.”
In the study, Rogers’ team redefines soft material behavior by considering a spectrum of yielding behaviors rather than categorizing it as either brittle or ductile. This innovative approach led to the development of a continuum model, unveiling the critical brittility factor in understanding the failure of soft materials.
Essentially, brittility determines how a material deforms permanently under stress. According to the team’s model, a higher brittility factor results in less permanent deformation before yielding in soft materials.
Similar to previous studies, the model was validated using data from numerous experiments that applied stress to various soft materials and measured their individual strain responses using a rheometer.
“We didn’t expect this study to explain as much as it does,” said Rogers, who is also an affiliate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of. I. “What we ended up with was a way to bring a whole bunch of soft material behaviors together under the same physics umbrella. Previously, they’d been studied independently or maybe all been applied simultaneously, but never thought of as being physically or mathematically connected.”
Researchers will now have the ability to precisely elucidate why certain materials are more resistant to rapid yielding than others, a longstanding question that has puzzled researchers for many years.
“This single parameter amazingly connects so many puzzling observations researchers have come across over the years,” Kamani said.
“This work marks the point at which we are approaching the crest of the hill in understanding soft materials behavior,” Rogers said. “We’ve always felt like each step takes us higher, but with no end in sight. Now we can see the top of the hill, and we are closer to the top and free to move forward in whatever direction we would like.”
Journal reference:
Krutarth M. Kamani and Simon A. Rogers. Brittle and ductile yielding in soft materials. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401409121
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