Hydraulic fractures are tensile fractures that occur in solid materials due to the natural intrusion or anthropogenic injection of a viscous fluid into a fracture channel. The deliberate creation of hydraulic fractures is part of an industrial technology h ...
The rocks forming a volcanic edifice or dome are typically saturated or partially-saturated with water. However, most experiments aimed at better understanding the mechanical behaviour of volcanic rocks have been performed on dry samples, and therefore mos ...
In impermeable media, a hydraulic fracture can continue to expand even without additional fluid injection if its volume exceeds the limiting volume of a hydrostatically loaded radial fracture. This limit depends on the mechanical properties of the surround ...
Understanding how things break and slide is of paramount importance to describe the dynamics of a broad range of physical systems. This includes day-to-day problems such as the breaking of a glass of wine or the sliding of skis on snow, but also engineerin ...
The strength of the interface between iron (Fe) and individual spherical silica (SiO2) inclusions of 5 +/- 1 mu m diameter is measured by means of in-situ micro-cantilever bending tests conducted under displacement control within a scanning electron micros ...
Owing to their high specific stiffness and strength, Carbon Fiber Reinforced Composites (CFRP) are ideal candidates for the development of lightweight high-performance structures. Within this family, thin-ply composites allow for wider design freedom and p ...
Earthquakes are natural phenomena that cause ground shaking and damage to people and infrastructures. Despite significant progress achieved in understanding how earthquakes start, propagate, and arrest, many aspects of their physics and mechanics remain no ...
Kirigami, the ancient technique of paper cutting, has been successfully applied to enhance the stretchability and ductility of nanoscale graphene. However, existing experimentally realized graphene kirigami (GK) are created by introducing parallel cuts, ex ...