Abstract
Hydrogels exhibit rate-dependent fracture behavior, due to solvent diffusion, rearrangement of the polymer network, and other mechanisms. To explore rate-dependent fracture behavior, a series of creep fracture experiments were performed on gelatin-based hydrogels under different controlled humidity, and load conditions. The crack tip boundary condition was controlled to non-immersed and fully water-saturated conditions. Additionally, full-field measurements of the displacement field were performed with digital image correlation. From these experiments, we show that humidity influences the crack initiation time but not the growing crack speed, and that water on the crack tip will significantly influence the fracture properties of the failure zone. Schapery’s viscoelastic J-like integral was adopted for analysis of the experimental measurement to distinguish bulk viscoelastic dissipation from the fracture process zone dissipation. We show that viscoelastic J-like integral is path-independent and can serve as a characterizing parameter for quasistatic crack growth, which provides a way to predict crack growth speed in the simulations.
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Notes
The time interval varied from 0.2 to 10 s to accommodate the different crack speeds experienced in different tests.
We also performed experiments in which the droplet was added at the same time as the load, and it took 0.5 to 2 h for the crack to grow, but no other significant differences were observed.
For the reasons that are not clear, the crack always branched into two as it ran out of water.
The point A moves with time.
Due to the limited resolution, the real strain value at the crack tip may be higher than what we measure.
We note that displacement boundary conditions can be converted into equivalent tractions needed to maintain the displacements (Schapery 1975b.)
Standard index notation is used where indices i, j have a range of (1, 2) and repeated index implies summation with respect to this index.
We measured creep compliance instead of relaxation modulus since creep tests produce high-quality strain measurements with less noise.
This corresponds to keeping the displacement fixed along the top support.
Standard J integral does not lead to a unique relationship with crack speed because it includes the bulk viscous dissipation.
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Acknowledgements
This research was performed during the course of an investigation into the behavior of hydrogels funded by the National Science Foundation, USA through a Grant CMMI-1538658; this support is gratefully acknowledged.
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Chen, S., Ravi-Chandar, K. Rate-dependent fracture behavior of gelatin-based hydrogels. Int J Fract 243, 185–202 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-023-00738-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-023-00738-3