Professional Documents
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, G. Gauthier
V. Lazarus
UPMC Univ Paris 6, UMR 7190 and CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean Le Rond dAlembert, Boite courrier 161-2,
4 Place Jussieu, F-75005, Paris, France
Department of Mathematics and Center for Computation & Technology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge
LA 70803, U.S.A.
UPMC Univ Paris 6, UMR 7608, Univ Paris-Sud, UMR 7608, and CNRS, UMR 7608. FAST, Bat 502, Campus
Univ, F-91405, Orsay, France
UPMC Univ Paris 6, UMR 7608, Univ Paris-Sud, UMR 7608, and CNRS, UMR 7608. FAST, Bat 502, Campus
Univ, F-91405, Orsay, France
1
approach to fracture mechanics proposed by Francfort & Marigo (1998) appears as a promis-
ing framework to address these issues. It extends the energetic theory of Grifth and treats
the crack geometry as a genuine unknown, making no a priori assumptions on its geometry
or temporal evolution. Instead, it postulates that the deformation and crack conguration of
a body at a given time is obtained by minimising the sum of its elastic and fracture ener-
gies, among all admissible crack sets and (discontinuous) displacement elds. In the simplest
model, the fracture energy is proportional to its surface in two space dimensions and its area
in three dimensions (Grifth fracture energy).
Of course such a minimisation problem is challenging in particular because it is techni-
cally not possible to test all crack congurations. One possibility is to suppose that the crack
shape is known and to restrict the minimisation on the subset formed by these morphologies.
But how can one be sure that the optimum solution belongs to this subset? Alternatively, to
answer this question, numerical regularized approaches can be used. Roughly, they consist
in replacing the minimisation on all possible crack congurations corresponding to a discon-
tinuity surface by a minimisation on a continuous scalar eld more suitable for numerical
purposes.
More precisely, their analysis borrows tools from the calculus of variations and free-
discontinuity problems (Ambrosio et al. 2000). Their numerical implementation relies on
the concept of variational approximation by elliptic functional (Braides 1998), where approx-
imated functionals depending on a regularization parameters are constructed. Froma technical
standpoint, the approximation takes place in the sense of convergence (Braides 2002) i.e.
one can prove that as the regularization parameter goes to 0, the minimisers of the regularized
functionals approaches that of the total energy. The specic regularized functional we focus
on here resembles gradient damage laws or phase eld approximations of sharp interfaces
models (Hakim & Karma 2009, Corson et al. 2009). It is very similar to the one proposed
by Ambrosio & Tortorelli (1992) where the crack set is represented by a secondary smooth
variable and the displacement eld is also approximated by a smooth function. The main ad-
vantages of this approach is that it eliminates the issue of representing discontinuous elds
when their discontinuity set is not known a priori. It also reduces energy minimisation with
respect to any admissible crack geometry to minimisation with respect to a smooth eld, a
much simpler problem. In addition, it can be discretized numerically using standard continu-
ous nite elements. The rst numerical implementation of the variational fracture mechanics
is reported in Bourdin et al. (2000). Further developments and applications may be found
in Bourdin et al. (2008), Chambolle et al. (2009), Del Piero et al. (2007), Lancioni & Royer-
Carfagni (2009), Amor et al. (2009), Freddi & Royer-Carfagni (2010). To our knowledge, no
precise quantitative comparison between this approach and experiments has been done so far.
One aim of this paper is to ll this gap.
For this, we focus on the complex cracking phenomena encountered in directional drying
experiments of colloidal suspensions conned in capillary tubes. During drying, the suspen-
sion gradually transforms into a drained porous solid matrix. Further drying induces a natural
shrinking of the solid matrix. In capillary cells, the shrinking is prevented by the strong adhe-
sion to the wall of the cell, and gives rise to high tensile stresses in the matrix. These stresses
are at the origin of complex crack patterns, whose shapes depend on the geometry of the cell
and the drying conditions. This kind of experiments has been proposed rst in at rectangular
capillary tubes (Allain & Limat 1995, Dufresne et al. 2003, 2006) and later on, in circular
ones (Gauthier et al. 2007, 2010). They are extended here to squared cell shapes. Crack prop-
agation in at specimens has been extensively studied by the traditional approach for instance
by Ba zant et al. (1979), Nemat-Nasser et al. (1980), Hofmann et al. (2006), Bahr et al. (2010).
Gauthier et al. (2007, 2010) recently showed that the observed crack patterns can be correctly
predicted by energy minimisation amongst a given family of cracks, namely arrays of paral-
lel cracks or star shaped cracks. Here, our aim is to compare the fracture patterns observed
experimentally to those found by numerical energy minimisation according to the variational
approach to fracture introduced above.
We show that the regularized form of the variational approach is able to predict the shape
of the crack patterns as a function of the cell shape, without any a priori hypotheses.
The outline of the paper is as follows. In Section 2, the experimental setup is described.
2
Various crack shapes are obtained by changing the suspension, the cell geometry and the
drying velocities. In the aim to predict the crack shape, we model (Section 3) the experiments
by a 2D linear elasticity problem in the cross-section, the drying loading being given by a
tensile isotropic inelastic strain. Then we suppose that the fracture conguration for a given
loading, material and cell geometry minimises the sum of the elastic and fracture energies.
This problem is rst solved by restricting the crack shapes to radial cracks and searching their
number that minimises the total energy (Section 4). The question then is to show if star-shape
cracks are energetically optimal. To answer it, the minimisation is performed numerically
using the regularizated form of the variational approach mentioned above. In Section 5, the
principle of this method is described and the simulation results are given and shown to be in
agreement with the direct minimisation for not too high loadings. For higher loadings more
complex crack shapes seems to be preferred to radial cracks. The close agreement with the
experiments is shown in Section 7. This demonstrates that (i) this simple 2D elastic model
captures the physics of the fracture in suspension drying phenomenon and (ii) the efciency
of the variational approach to predict complex crack morphologies without any preliminar
assumption on the shape.
2 Experiments
Fractured gel
Air satured with water
Suspension
Evaporation surface C
r
a
c
k
i
n
g
a
n
d
d
r
y
i
n
g
d
i
r
e
c
t
i
o
n
Crosssection view
(a) Experimental setup. (b) Pictures of some
cross section cuts (the
colors depend on the
light used).
Figure 1: A vertical glass capillary is lled with a colloidal suspension; the single bottom open
edge allows for evaporation of the water in a surrounding maintained at a constant relative humidity
(RH) and temperature (T). The cross-sectional shape of the cracks depend on the cell shape and
size and on the drying conditions.
The experiments are similar to those of Gauthier et al. (2007, 2010). They are carried
out using aqueous suspensions of mono disperse silica spherical particles (Ludox
SM30 of
3
radius r 3.5 nm or Ludox
2d
0
:=
_
G
c
ER
1
2
(3)
where Ris a characteristic length associated with the cross-section, typically its radius. Hence,
the potential energy P
of the cross-section occupying the open set C and associated to a
displacement eld u and a crack set for a loading parameter is given by
P
(u, ) :=
_
C/
w
((u))dS, with w
() := w
_
,
_
G
c
/ER1
2
_
. (4)
The total energy is dened as the sum of the potential energy and the surface energy required
to create the cracks:
E
(u, ) := P
(u, ) +S(). (5)
5
For any given loading parameter , we seek to nd the crack set and displacement eld u
as the global minimiser of (5) amongst any admissible crack set and kinematically admissible
displacement elds. The admissible crack sets consist of all possible curves or sets of curves
inside the boundary of C. For any given crack set , the space of the admissible displacements
is
U() := {u H
1
(C \ ; R
2
), u = 0 on C}, (6)
i.e. it consists of all vector valued elds satisfying the adhesion boundary condition and suf-
ciently smooth (square integrable with square integrable rst derivatives) on the uncracked
domain.
More precisely, the global minimality condition can be expressed as:
Find C, u U() : E
(u, ) E
(u
),
C, u
U(
). (7)
3.3 Remarks
The model presented above deserves several remarks:
The scaling factor
_
G
c
/ER in (3) renders all the results, presented in terms of in the
rest of the paper, independent of the material constants and cross-sectional dimension.
Other choices for the relevant non dimensional parameter are possible. In particular, as
in Gauthier et al. (2010), one could also chose to parameterize the loading in terms of
the Grifth length L
c
:= EG
c
/
2
0
, where
0
is a prestress. After some calculations,
one can relate and L
c
by
L
c
=
R
2
(1 2)
2
(1 +)
2
. (8)
This relation will be useful in Section 7 as it will allow us to estimate the value of for
various experiments.
We consider the problem of nding the optimal displacement eld and crack pattern in a
cross section of the tube of Figure 1 for a given value of the loading parameter, indepen-
dently of the previous history or irreversibility conditions on preexistent crack patterns.
We refer to this problem as a static formulation of the fracture mechanics problem, in
opposition to the quasi-static setting, where one need to account for the previous his-
tory and the irreversible nature of crack propagation through unilateral minimisation as
in Francfort & Marigo (1998).
Perfect bonding to the walls of the cell is accounted for in the minimisation principle (7)
by imposing null-displacement boundary conditions on u, and that the admissible cracks
be included in the open set C. This in particular proscribes cracks along C.
The admissible displacement elds are potentially discontinuous across cracks , but
the location of the potential discontinuities themselves is not known a priori. This ren-
ders the numerical minimisation of (5) challenging as most numerical methods such
as cohesive, discontinuous or extended nite element methods require at least some a
priori knowledge of the crack path or of its topology. Indeed, this problem falls into
the broader class of free discontinuity problems for which a wealth of mathematical and
numerical literature now exists. In the following, we solely focus on the numerical im-
plementation using an extension of that proposed in Bourdin et al. (2000) and Bourdin
(2007), and inspired from Ambrosio and Tortorellis results on the approximation of
the Mumford-Shah functional by means of elliptic functionals Ambrosio & Tortorelli
(1990, 1992). We refer the reader interested in the analysis of the model to Francfort &
Larsen (2003), Dal Maso et al. (2005), Bourdin et al. (2008), and references within.
4 Simple illustration: star-shaped cracks in circular cells
Although the main strength of the variational approach to fracture is that it does not require any
a priori hypotheses on crack geometry, the following basic computation provides a valuable
6
insight into our approach. It is essentially equivalent to that of Gauthier et al. (2010) with
the difference that the loading parameter we consider here is the inelastic strain instead of the
prestress. We consider a circular cell with radius R and star shaped cracks. By
n
, (n > 1),
we denote a curve consisting of the union of n equi-distributed radial segments partitioning
the cell into n polar regions. By analogy, we write
1
= . Our motivation for considering
such geometries comes from the fact that they are frequently observed in the experiments, at
least for small values of n.
Note rst that for a given crack pattern , the potential energy can computed by solving a
linear elasticity problem, and we write
P
() := min
uU()
P
(u, ), (9)
the potential energy of the equilibrium displacement. It is then easy to see that the form of
the strain energy density (2) implies that P
() =
2
P
1
(), so that we can rewrite the total
energy in the form
E
() =
2
P
1
() +S(). (10)
Furthermore, for a star-shaped crack
n
, using eq. (2), one has
E
(
n
) =
2
P
1
(
n
) +nG
c
R. (11)
For n = 1 the problem can be solved in closed form, the elastic equilibrium is achieved for
u = 0 and the total energy is E
() = P
() =
2
G
c
R/(1 + )(1 2). For n > 1,
P
1
(
n
) can be computed by a simple nite element computation. In this setting, for a given
loading parameter , energy minimisation reduces to a discrete minimisation problem with
respect to n. And the total energy of the solution as a function of the loading parameter can
be obtained by taking the lower envelope of the family of energy curves associated to each
conguration. Note that this construction is essentially equivalent to that of the backtracking
algorithm proposed in Bourdin (2007).
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
0
2
4
6
8
10
2.15 1.55 0.97 0.73
R
G
c
n1
n2
n3
n4
n5
(a) Total energy associated with
n
for n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
0
2
4
6
8
10
2.15 1.55 0.97 0.73
R
G
c
(b) The lower envelope of the family of energy curves
gives the energy of the minimiser
Figure 2: Energy minimisation amongst star-shaped cracks.
Figure 2(a) represents the total energy associated with
n
as a function of the loading
parameter for n = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and = 0.3. Using this graph and the global minimality
principle (7), it is easy to identify the optimal crack conguration associated with a given
load (the branch of the energy with the smallest value at ) as well as the bifurcation points
upon which the geometry of the optimal crack set changes (the crossing points upon which
the energy branch achieving minimality changes). We obtain that there exists a family (0 =
0
,
1
,
2
, ) of critical loadings such that for
i1
< <
i
, i = 1, 2, , the optimal crack
conguration is any curve in the family
i
. Of course, in the absence of defects or impurities,
7
the solution for a given loading parameter is unique up to a rotation. The numerical values
of the critical loadings are
1
0.73,
2
0.97,
3
1.55,
4
2.15, and
5
2.76.
Figure 2(b) shows the energy associated with the optimal conguration, obtained by taking
the lower envelope of the family of curves plotted in the left.
Before closing this simple example, we stress again that this analysis is based upon the
assumption that the optimal crack geometry is a star-shaped pattern. As we will see in the fol-
lowing sections, relaxing this hypothesis allows to show that the star-shape cracks are indeed
optimum for not too high loading and can yield to more complicated but energetically least
costly crack patterns for higher loading.
5 General case: minimisation over arbitrary crack geome-
tries
The numerical implementation we use is essentially similar to the one described in Bourdin
et al. (2000, 2008), Bourdin (2007). We briey recall its properties here and refer the reader
to the literature for further details.
5.1 Regularization by elliptic functionals
The main idea of our approach was originally developed by Ambrosio & Tortorelli (1992)
for an image segmentation (Mumford & Shah 1989) problem, and adapted to fracture me-
chanics by Bourdin et al. (2000). One introduces a small parameter with dimension of a
length, a secondary variable taking its values in [0, 1] and representing the crack set, and the
regularized functional
E
()
(u, ) :=
_
C
((1 )
2
+k
)w
((u))dS +
3G
c
8
_
C
_
+
_
dS. (12)
Hence, one approximates the solution of (7) by those of the following minimisation problem:
min
uU,A
E
()
(u, ) (13)
where U = {u H
1
(C; R
2
), u = 0 on C} and A = {0 1, H
1
(C; R), =
0 on C}.
This regularized functional can be shown to converge in the sense of convergence to
the total energy (5). This implies that for any , the minimisers of E
()
converges as 0
to minimisers of E
, and that each term in (12) converges to the matching one in (5). The
parameter k
=
o(). We refer the interested reader to Braides (2002), Dal Maso (1993) for more details on
convergence and to Braides (1998), Bourdin et al. (2008) for details on the approximation
of E
by E
()
. Formally, as goes to 0, remains close to 0 away from the cracks, and
approaches 1 along the cracks. For small but non-zero values of , both arguments u and of
E
()
are continuous functions with high gradients (of order 1/) in bands of width .
From a mechanical point of view, the functional (12) can be interpreted as the energy
functional of a non-local gradient damage model, where plays the role of the damage eld
and of the internal length (Pham, Amor, Marigo & Maurini 2011). We also point out that
the regularized energy we use here is slightly different from the one in Bourdin et al. (2000)
and Bourdin et al. (2008). The form used here has some advantages from a numerical and the-
oretical standpoints, which are not discussed here. The interested reader is referred to Pham,
Amor, Marigo & Maurini (2011) for further details on this point. Despite their apparent sim-
ilarities, there are signicant differences between our numerical approach and the phase-eld
fracture models (see e.g. Hakim & Karma 2009). The regularized energy (12) resembles a
phase-eld equation. However, even in the static or quasi-static case, phase-eld models are
formulated as a rate-dependent evolution equation and stated as fracture models per se. Here,
8
we do not see our regularized formulation as a fracture model, but merely as a numerical
approximation of the total energy of the static or quasi-static variational approach of Franc-
fort & Marigo (1998). This approximation is deeply rooted in the mathematical literature on
free-discontinuity problems (Braides 1998). In particular the minimisation principle for the
regularized energy is derived from that of the variational model in the static case.
5.2 Numerical implementation
The numerical minimisation of (12) is implemented in a way similar to that described in Bour-
din (2007). We discretize the regularized energy by means of linear Lagrange nite ele-
ments over an unstructured mesh. As long as the mesh size h is such that h = o(), the
convergence property of (12) to (5) is also true for the discretization of the regularized en-
ergy (see Bellettini & Coscia (1994), Bourdin (1999), Burke et al. (2010) for instance). This
compatibility condition leads to ne meshes, which are better dealt with using parallel super-
computers. We use PETSc (Balay et al. 1997, 2010, 2011) for data distribution, parallel linear
algebra, and TAO (Benson et al. 2010) for the constrained optimization. In order to avoid
prefered directions in the mesh, we use the Delaunay-Voronoi mesh algorithm implemented
in Cubit, from Sandia National Laboratories.
Due to the size of the problems, global minimisation algorithms are not practical. Instead,
we notice that although (12) is non convex, it is convex with respect to each variable indi-
vidually. We alternate minimisations with respect to u and , an algorithm akin to a block
Newton method or a segregated solver. Note that minimisation with respect to u is equivalent
to solving a simple linear elasticity problem, but that minimisation with respect to [0, 1]
requires an actual box-constrained minimisation algorithm. Of course, as the total energy is
non convex, one cannot expect convergence to a global minimiser. However, one can prove
that the alternate minimisation process is unconditionally stable and globally decreasing and
that it leads to a stationary point of (12) which may be a local (or global) minimiser or a
saddle point of the energy. From a practical standpoint we observe that the algorithm is quite
robust with respect to the mesh discretization, provided that the regularization length is large
enough compared to the mesh size. However it can be quite sensitive with respect to the initial
value of u and . Different choices of the initial guess or of the regularization parameter
can lead to convergence to different solutions
In the following section, we present numerical experiments performed using the method
as described above, highlight its shortcomings and illustrate how to decrease the sensitivity
with respect to the choice of initial conguration and regularization parameter.
6 Numerical simulations
6.1 Selection of crack shapes
We rst illustrate our numerical approach on circular cells. Experimental evidence suggests
that for small values of , the actual fracture pattern resembles the star-shaped cracks from
Section 4. We can use this feature to perform partial verication of our numerical approach.
As dimensional analysis highlights the dependency of the fracture energy (5) on a single
loading parameter, , it is natural to replace the regularization length with a non-dimensional
parameter
= /R.
Figure 3 presents the eld obtained by numerical minimisation of (12) for various
choices of the parameters and
with a cell of radius R = 1. The material parameters (E,
G
c
) were set to 1 without loss of generality, and the Poisson ratio to 0.3. In each computation,
the mesh size was h = 0.025 and the residual stiffness was set to k
= 10
6
. The alternate
minimisation algorithm was initialized with = 0, u = 0. The value 1 (corresponding to
cracks) of is encoded in red and the value 0 (the un-cracked material) in blue. A rst glance
at the table highlights the wide variety of crack geometries obtained, and that the complexity
of the fracture pattern increases with the loading parameter. Again we stress that no hypothe-
sis on this geometry is made in the model and that the shape of the crack patterns is purely an
9
) depending on
, the
un-cracked conguration = 0 is a stable critical point of (12). In a simpler 1d setting, it is
known that
) = O(1/
)
increases as
0. When alternate minimisations iterates escape the un-cracked solution,
they converge to the nearest critical point which may or may not be the global minimiser of
the energy.
If the regularized model (12) is seen as a gradient damage model with internal length
(see
Pham, Amor, Marigo & Maurini 2011, Pham, Marigo & Maurini 2011), and if one focusses
on criticality instead of global minimality, this behavior is consistent with a scale effect linking
the critical load and the ratio of the structural dimension and the internal length (Ba zant 1999).
In the present study, we stand by the interpretation that the regularization length is an articial
numerical parameter and we seek global minimisers of the regularized energy. We avoid
)
for decreasing values of the regularization
length, initializing each computation with the eld obtained at the previous one. Figure 3(b)
represents the outcome of such a series of computations highlighting, how the continuation
approach eliminates the sensitivity of the numerical result on the regularization length
and
allows us to retrieve an accurate representation of the crack geometry without the need for
extremely ne meshes. From a qualitative standpoint, one observes that the crack geometry
remains unchanged as the regularization length is decreased. Table 1 provides a quantitative
comparison of the quality of the solutions. In each case, the congurations obtained using
continuation (last column of Figure 3(b)) have a lesser energy than the one obtained through a
direct computation (Figure 3(a)). Since we are interested in energy minimising conguration,
these are the ones we retain. To obtain accurate values of the fracture energies with this choice
of h = O(
), and following the discussion in Bourdin et al. (2008) (Sec 8.1.1 p.103), all the
results are obtained by replacing the fracture toughness by G
(num)
c
= G
c
/(1 + 3h/8
). This
is especially important when comparing multiple computations obtained with different ratios
h/
.
It is possible to further select the optimal crack geometry as a function on the basis of
the global minimality principle (13) by using a method similar to that in Section 4. Noticing
that for a given -eld (i.e. crack geometry) the elastic part of the total energy (12) scales
quadratically with the loading, one can calculate the total energy that each of the crack patterns
obtained numerically for a given loading
R
G
c
(a) Energies associated with the crack geometries identied in Figure 3(b) as a func-
tion of the loading parameter. Thick black lines distinguishes energy curves corre-
sponding to congurations attaining the minimal energy for some value of the loading
parameters. The gridlines marks the critical loading for the passage of one optimal
curve to the next. Note that for large the identication of critical loadings becomes
difcult.
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
0
2
4
6
8
10
2.65 2.01 1.51 0.96 0.71
R
G
c
(b) Comparison of the optimal energy obtained using minimisation over star shaped
cracks (dashed line) and numerical simulation (continuous line). The continuous line
is the lower envelope of the curves in gure 4(a) . The pictures represent the optimal
crack shapes in each range of the loading parameter delimited by the gridlines.
Figure 4: Minimisation over star-shaped cracks vs. minimisation of functional (12). As the loading
increases, our numerical method identies crack congurations with much lower energetically than
star-shaped cracks.
12
Table 1: Energies of the numerical solutions in Figure 3 for
= 0.05 without (left) or with (right)
continuation.
Elastic Surface Total
0.6 2.2 0 2.2
0.8 3.9 0 3.9
1.0 6.0 0 6.0
1.2 8.7 0 8.7
1.4 1.6 3.9 5.5
1.6 2.0 4.0 6.0
1.8 1.9 4.9 6.8
2.0 2.0 5.3 7.3
2.2 2.1 5.7 7.8
2.5 2.1 6.4 8.5
3.0 2.1 7.3 9.4
4.5 2.3 9.6 11.8
5.0 2.4 9.8 12.2
Elastic Surface Total
0.6 2.2 0 2.2
0.8 1.5 1.8 3.4
1.0 1.3 2.8 4.1
1.2 1.7 2.9 4.6
1.4 2.0 3.3 5.3
1.6 2.0 3.9 5.9
1.8 2.0 4.4 6.4
2.0 2.0 4.9 6.9
2.2 2.0 5.4 7.4
2.5 2.1 5.9 8.0
3.0 2.1 6.9 9.1
4.5 2.3 9.2 11.5
5.0 2.4 9.9 12.3
6.2 Comparison with star-shaped cracks
Figure 4(b) compares the total energy of these congurations with the energy of the star-
shaped cracks taken from Figure 2 (dashed line). For small values of the loading parameter,
we obtain similar geometries and critical loading. The surface energy obtained is close to the
number of branches, and the critical loading upon which we obtain a single straight crack is
0.71 (vs. a theoretical value of
2
= 0.73). Bifurcation between straight and Y-shaped cracks
take place at 0.94 (vs. a theoretical value of
2
= 0.97).
More interestingly, for larger values of
, our numerical simulations have identied mul-
tiple congurations that are energetically close to each other but always less expensive than
star-shaped cracks. In particular, we show that perfect 5-branch stars are never optimal and
that congurations consisting of either two triple junctions very close to each others (see for
instance = 1.6 in Figure 3(b)), a 4-branch star whose branches split in two near the cell
boundary (see for instance = 1.8, 2.0, 2.2 in Figure 3(b)), or a more complicated patterns
like the stick gure looking 5 cracks conguration that we obtain for = 2.5 have lesser
energy. Of course, that the local geometry near the crack crossing resembles 2 triple junctions
near each others rather that an X does not really come up as a surprise. As mentioned earlier,
the fracture energy (5) resembles the Mumford-Shah energy for edge segmentation (Mumford
& Shah 1989). Therefore, it seems natural to expect that if they posses some form of regu-
larity, optimal crack geometries satisfy the Mumford-Shah conjecture which rules out crack
crossing, kinks and only allows cracks to meet at 120
R
G
c
Figure 6: Range of parameters in which each of the conguration identied in Figure 5 is optimal
the material constants E and G
c
of the porous medium may depend on the microstructure,
inuenced by formation dynamics.
Instead of performing such difcult measurements, whose relevance to our problem may
be questioned, we used the method presented in Gauthier et al. (2010), which we briey
summarize. The basis of the method is to consider a directional drying experiment in thin
rectangular cells (Allain & Limat 1995). In this geometry, an array of parallel tunneling cracks
is obtained and the cracks spacing can be correlated to the Grifth length L
c
:= EG
c
/
2
0
(
0
being the prestress induced by the lms drying). Using an energy minimisation principle
similar to the one in Section 4, one can show that the spacing is proportional to
L
c
t, t
being the cells thickness and in particular, for = 0.3, one obtains 3.1
L
c
t. For a given
material and drying parameter, the value of L
c
can therefore be deduced from measurements
of . Table 2 presents the value of L
c
for Ludox
HS40
(r 6 nm) under high velocity and slow velocity conditions.
L
c
Ludox
HS40 (r 6 nm)
HV 34 10 40 10
SV 60 18 45 15
Table 2: Values of Grifths length L
c
(in m) for several Ludox
HV/SV L
c
(m) R (m) n
a SM30 HV 34 10 50 5 1 0.6 0.12
b SM30 SV 60 18 150 15 2 0.8 0.16
c SM30 SV 60 18 500 50 3 1.5 0.30
d HS40 SV 45 15 500 50 4 1.7 0.37
e HS40 HV 40 10 500 50 4 1.8 0.27
f SM30 HV 34 10 500 50 4 2.0 0.39
g HS40 HV 40 10 750 75 5 2.3 0.41
h SM30 HV 34 10 750 75 5 2.4 0.48
Table 3: Experimental results on circular cells. The value of n corresponds to the number of
sectors delimited by the cracks as in Section 4.
In order to perform a quantitative comparison, we summarize all the results obtained in
the case of circular cells in Figure 7. The rst row corresponds to the outcome of the semi-
analytical minimization over star shaped cracks. The critical values of the loading parameters
computed in Section 4 upon which bifurcation between different morphologies take place
is printed in red letters, and represented by red dashed vertical lines. The second row cor-
responds to the numerical experiments without a priori hypotheses on the crack path. The
critical loads extracted from Figure 4(a) are printed in black letters, and represented by ver-
tical solid black lines. As highlighted in Figure 4(b), the critical loads obtained in the case
of the bifurcation from
1
to
2
, then
3
and
4
are very close. This part of the table can be
seen as a verication of the numerical implementation, i.e. as evidences that the computed
solutions are indeed solution of the variational fracture model. The third row summarizes the
outcome of the experiments from Table 3. For each experiment, the value of the loading pa-
rameter is shown together with the accuracy of the measurement. When available, photos of
the cross sections are also displayed. We observe that for every single choice of , the crack
geometry predicted by our approach matches the one observed in the experiment. This acts
as a validation of the variational fracture model as a predictive tool in the setting of drying of
colloidal suspension.
a n1
b n2 c n3
d n4
e n4
f n4
g n5
h n5
0.71 0.96 1.51 2.01
0.73 0.97 1.55 2.15
Figure 7: Comparison between semi-analytical, numerical and experimental results for circular
cells.
We also did a single experiment on a square cell, for an estimated value 1.8 of the
16
loading parameter for which we obtained two diagonal cracks (see the bottom image in Fig-
ure 1b). Again, the numerical simulation in this case matches the experiment (see Figures 5
and 6).
Despite the modeling simplifying assumption, the complexity of the numerical technique,
and the uncertainty of the measurement of the parameters, the agreement between analysis,
simulation, and experiments is excellent. Our model correctly captures the essential physics
of the crack formation giving credit to the idea that crack growth can be predicted by minimi-
sation of the sum of elastic and surface energy over all possible crack path. In order to further
justify this idea, one will need to compare experiments and simulations for higher loading
parameters in which case numerical simulations identify complex crack patterns with signif-
icantly lower energy than classical star-shaped solutions. For instance, better quality imaging
will be required to unambiguously determine if the the 5 cracks congurations we observe ex-
perimentally (see Figures 1(b) or 7) resembles a stick gure as in our numerical simulation
(cf. Figure 3 for = 2.5), a regular 5-branch star, or something completely different.
8 Conclusions and future work
In this paper, we have presented some directional drying experiments of colloidal suspensions
realized in capillary cells where solvent evaporation leads to the formation of a growing porous
solid media. Due to shrinkage prevented by adhesion on the wall of the cells, high tensile
stresses appear that give rise to cracks of various morphologies depending on the cell geometry
and the drying velocities.
We proposed a simple model based on the assumption that when the crack cross sec-
tional geometry does not evolve, this problem can be reduced to a 2d static one. We showed
that changes in crack geometry due to different materials and experimental condition can be
accounted for by a single dimensionless parameter which can represent the intensity of the
tensile strain or stress induced by drying or the energetic cost of growing cracks. We used
the variational approach to fracture to account for crack propagation in the porous medium as
a function of this parameter without any underlying assumptions on crack geometry. Under
additional assumptions on the crack geometry, we computed the range of loading parameters
for which optimality may be achieved by star-shaped cracks. We then presented a numeri-
cal method and some simulations allowing us to predict crack patterns without any a priori
knowledge. Finally, we achieve qualitative and quantitative agreement between numerical
simulation, semi-analytical solutions and experiments.
At this point, though, we were not able to perform qualitative or quantitative comparisons
for higher values of the loading parameters, where the virtue of the variational approach to
fracture over more conventional ones requiring at least some a priori knowledge of the crack
path becomes more striking. Such experiments will require additional work to deal with larger
cells for instance. In these situations, the main difculty is the post-mortem analysis of the
crack geometry. Microphotography though the sides of the cells becomes hard to interpret,
and cutting the tubes without perturbing the cracks geometry is difcult. Perhaps the solution
lies in full 3d imaging of the cells and post-processing in order to highlight the location of
the cracks. From the modeling perspective, for larger cell size, a full three-dimensional linear
poroelasticity model initiated by Biot (1941) will become necessary. Finally, from a physico-
chemical point of view, the link between the drying velocity and the macroscopic signature
will have to be explored.
Acknowledgements
The work of V. Lazarus and G. Gauthier was partially supported by the ANR Program JC-
JC ANR-05-JCJC-0029 Morphologies. C. Maurini gratefully acknowledges the funding of
the French National Research Council (CNRS) for a PICS bilateral exchange program with
B. Bourdin and a grant of the University Pierre et Marie Curie EMERGENCES-UPMC.
17
B. Bourdins work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under the grant
DMS-0909267. Some of the numerical experiments were performed using the National Sci-
ence Foundation TeraGrid resources (Grandinetti 2007) provided by TACC at the University
of Texas under the Teragrid Resource Allocation TG-DMS060014N and the resources of the
Institut du D eveloppement et des Ressources en Informatique Scientique (IDRIS) under the
DARI 2011 allocation 100064.
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