Though they share the similarity of inducing material failure at a crack tip, the cutting and tearing energies of soft materials cannot be quantitatively related to one another. One of the reasons for this lack of understanding comes from additional complications that arise during standard cutting techniques. Decades ago, Lake and Yeoh [Int. J. of Fracture, 1978] described a natural rubber cutting method that uses a `Y-shaped' sample geometry to mitigate several of these challenges, including minimizing friction and controlling the strain energy available to drive fracture. The latter, understood via a fracture mechanics framework, enables relative tuning between a tearing contribution to the cutting energy and a cutting contribution. In this manuscript, we extend Lake and Yeoh's largely unreplicated results to softer, more highly deformable polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) materials. The range of applicability of this technique to variations in material response, sample geometry, boundary conditions, and cutting rate is large. We utilize this flexibility to describe factors leading to the onset of a material-dependent, stick-slip cutting response, which occurs at low cutting rates and high tearing contributions. Furthermore, variation in cutting blade radius reveals a minimum cutting energy threshold even for blades with radii on the order of a few tens of nanometers. For blunter blades, cutting energy reflects the effects of material strain-stiffening. These results establish the Y-shaped cutting geometry as a useful tool in the study of soft fracture.
more »
« less
The long-term case for partial-cutting over clear-cutting in the southern Appalachians USA
- Award ID(s):
- 1637522
- PAR ID:
- 10223566
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- New Forests
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0169-4286
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 273 to 295
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
This paper develops a global variational approach to cutting curved surfaces so that they can be flattened into the plane with low metric distortion. Such cuts are a critical component in a variety of algorithms that seek to parameterize surfaces over flat domains, or fabricate structures from flat materials. Rather than evaluate the quality of a cut solely based on properties of the curve itself (e.g., its length or curvature), we formulate a flow that directly optimizes the distortion induced by cutting and flattening. Notably, we do not have to explicitly parameterize the surface in order to evaluate the cost of a cut, but can instead integrate a simple evolution equation defined on the cut curve itself. We arrive at this flow via a novel application of shape derivatives to the Yamabe equation from conformal geometry. We then develop an Eulerian numerical integrator on triangulated surfaces, which does not restrict cuts to mesh edges and can incorporate user-defined data such as importance or occlusion. The resulting cut curves can be used to drive distortion to arbitrarily low levels, and have a very different character from cuts obtained via purely discrete formulations. We briefly explore potential applications to computational design, as well as connections to space filling curves and the problem of uniform heat distribution.more » « less
-
Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT)-based analysis allows exhaustive reasoning over complex distributed control plane routing behaviors, enabling verification of converged routing states under arbitrary conditions. To improve scalability of SMT solving, we introduce a modular verification approach to network control plane verification, where we cut a network into smaller fragments. Users specify an annotated cut which describes how to generate these fragments from the monolithic network, and we verify each fragment independently, using these annotations to define assumptions and guarantees over fragments akin to assume-guarantee reasoning. We prove that any converged states of the fragments are converged states of the monolithic network, and there exists an annotated cut that can generate fragments corresponding to any converged state of the monolithic network. We implement this procedure as Kirigami, an extension of the network verification language and tool NV, and evaluate it on industrial topologies with synthesized policies. We observe a 10x improvement in end-to-end NV verification time, with SMT solve time improving by up to 6 orders of magnitude.more » « less
-
In this paper, we consider the classic fair division problem of allocating m divisible items to n agents with linear valuations over the items. We define novel notions of fair shares from the perspective of individual agents via the cake-cutting process. These shares generalize the notion of proportionality by taking into account the valuations of other agents via constraints capturing envy. We study what fraction (approximation) of these shares are achievable in the worst case, and present tight and non-trivial approximation bounds as a function of n and m. In particular, we show a tight approximation bound of Θ(√n) for various notions of such shares. We show this bound via a novel application of dual fitting, which may be of independent interest. We also present a bound of O(m^(2/3)) for a strict notion of share, with an almost matching lower bound. We further develop weaker notions of shares whose approximation bounds interpolate smoothly between proportionality and the shares described above. We finally present empirical results showing that our definitions lead to more reasonable shares than the standard fair share notion of proportionality.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

