Seminars

Whether in human body (skins, bones, teeth...), in food (cheeses, caramel chunks...), in homes (paintings, sealing joints...), in nature (basalt columns, barks, soils...) or in manufactured objects (aircrafts, screens, composites, coatings...), fracture patterns often worry us, are sometimes provoked on purpose, but their wealth always fascinates us. In the framework of brittle fracture mechanics, I will present some recent results having intricate shapes as common feature: fingering instability within a highly heterogeneous interface, segmentation and coalescence in presence of tearing mode III loading, multi-cracking during the drying of colloidal dispersions.

Véronique Lazarus is currently associate professor in the Department of Physics at University Paris Sud (Orsay, France) and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She earned her M.S. degree (1994) in engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées (ENSTA, Paris Tech) and her Ph.D. (1997) in mechanical engineering from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris, France). Her research topics concern brittle fracture mechanics at the continuum scale. She has interest in putting together experimental, mathematical and numerical tools to understand complex crack patterns emergence and its implication on material reliability. Ongoing research tackles tearing mode III fracture, crack propagation along textured interfaces, and intricate crack patterns occurring during drying of colloidal dispersions.