Fracture of Soft Materials

Soft materials, such as elastomers and hydrogels, are key components in a wide range of applications, including stretchable electronics, soft robotics, tissue engineering, and biomedical devices. Fracture of soft materials often sets the limit for their applications in designing, manufacturing, reliability and service lifetime. Understanding fracture of these soft materials requires a close synergy between mechanics and chemistry. On one hand, mechanics of soft materials involves large deformation, nonlinear elastic and inelastic properties, and chemo-mechanical coupling, all contributing to fracture processes. Characterization of fracture properties of soft materials such as strength, toughness, and fatigue requires an extension of the classical fracture mechanics and new experimental methods. On the other hand, the chemistry of soft materials is essential for the discovery and development of new materials with desirable fracture properties. The underlying mechanisms of fracture are often rooted in chemistry at microscopic scales and manifested by mechanics at larger scales in experiments and practical applications. Recent research activities have surged in efforts for fundamental understanding of the fracture phenomena and for developing new soft materials with enhanced fracture properties. This AmeriMech symposium aims to bring together leading active researchers in the field, from around the world and across disciplinary boundaries, to foster close interactions and exchanges of forward-looking research ideas.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Strength and toughness of soft materials

• Fatigue of soft materials

• Molecular design of soft materials to resist fracture and fatigue

• Cavitation and damage in soft materials

• Toughening mechanisms

• Healing mechanisms

• Fracture of soft metamaterials and composites

• Experimental methods for measuring fracture and fatigue of soft materials

• Modeling and simulations

 This AmeriMech Symposium is sponsored by the U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM), National Science Foundation (NSF) and Springer.