Séminaire de Véronique Lazarus

Anisotropic materials are gaining importance in industry, driven by new applications and environ-mental concerns, from wood construction, single crystals for photovoltaic applications, or aerospace turbines, to materials manufactured by 3D printing. However, due to the lack of certified damage tolerance models guaranteeing their resistance to failure, their use in sensitive components where failure must be avoided at all costs is limited.
The aim of my presentation is to show that the versatility of additive manufacturing enables the design of experiments to challenge advanced experimental and numerical approaches to fracture mechanics. To this end, I will present an overview of our recent studies on crack propagation in polycarbonate samples printed using fused deposition modeling. We chose this material specifically to fall within the framework of isotropic linear elastic fracture mechanics in order to focus on the effect of anisotropic fracture energy [1]. A close comparison between experiments and simulations led us to assess Digital Image Correlation for angular crack trajectories [2], to question crack propagation under monotonic [3] or cyclic loads for which different trajectories have been observed [4], but also the numerical biases inherent in phase field simulations, even for isotropic materials [5, 6].

 

References
[1]    T. Corre and V. Lazarus. Kinked crack paths in polycarbonate samples printed by fused deposition modelling using criss-cross patterns. International Journal of Fracture, 230(1):19–31, July 2021.
[2]    T. Corre, F. Hild, and V. Lazarus. Stress intensity factor determination along a kinked crack path by DIC analyses. International Journal of Fracture, 249(3):42, 2025.
[3]    X. Zhai, T. Corre, and V. Lazarus. A FDM-based experimental benchmark for evaluating quasistatic crack propagation in anisotropic linear elastic materials. Engineering Fracture Mechanics, 324(111175), 2025.
 
[4]    X. Zhai, T. Corre, A. Mesgarnejad, A. Karma, and V. Lazarus. Path differences between quasistatic and fatigue cracks in anisotropic media. Physical review E, 110(6), 2024.
[5]    Flavien Loiseau and Veronique Lazarus. How to introduce an initial crack in phase field simulations to accurately predict the linear elastic fracture propagation threshold? Journal of Theoretical, Computational and Applied Mechanics, Jun 2025.
[6]    Flavien Loiseau and Véronique Lazarus. Path-following methods for phase-field simulation of quasi-static crack propagation. International Journal of Solids and Structures, 334:113974, 2026.