Ductile and Brittle Yielding in Thermal and Athermal Amorphous Materials

Barlow, Hugh J.; Cochran, James O.; Fielding, Suzanne M.

doi:10.1103/physrevlett.125.168003

Ductile and Brittle Yielding in Thermal and Athermal Amorphous Materials

Barlow, Hugh J.; Cochran, James O.; Fielding, Suzanne M.

Authors

Hugh J. Barlow

James Cochran james.o.cochran@durham.ac.uk
PGR Student Doctor of Philosophy

Professor Suzanne Fielding suzanne.fielding@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Abstract

We study theoretically the yielding of sheared amorphous materials as a function of increasing levels of initial sample annealing prior to shear, in three widely used constitutive models and three widely studied annealing protocols. In thermal systems we find a gradual progression, with increasing annealing, from smoothly “ductile” yielding, in which the sample remains homogeneous, to abruptly “brittle” yielding, in which it becomes strongly shear banded. This progression arises from an increase with annealing in the size of an overshoot in the underlying stress-strain curve for homogeneous shear, which causes a shear banding instability that becomes more severe with increasing annealing. Ductile and brittle yielding thereby emerge as two limiting cases of a continuum of yielding transitions, from gradual to catastrophic. In contrast, athermal systems with a stress overshoot always show brittle yielding at low shear rates, however small the overshoot.

Citation

Barlow, H. J., Cochran, J. O., & Fielding, S. M. (2020). Ductile and Brittle Yielding in Thermal and Athermal Amorphous Materials. Physical Review Letters, 125(16), Article 168003. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.125.168003

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Sep 9, 2020
Online Publication Date	Oct 15, 2020
Publication Date	2020-10
Deposit Date	Oct 28, 2020
Publicly Available Date	Oct 28, 2020
Journal	Physical Review Letters
Print ISSN	0031-9007
Electronic ISSN	1079-7114
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	125
Issue	16
Article Number	168003
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.125.168003

Files

Published Journal Article (4 Mb)
PDF

Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.