Journal
SOFT MATTER
Volume 17, Issue 16, Pages 4266-4274Publisher
ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY
DOI: 10.1039/d1sm00325a
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Funding
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union [695351 - CHEMECH]
- WBI world excellence post-doctoral fellowship
- French Government program Investissements d'Avenir'' LABEX INTERACTIFS [ANR-11-LABX-0017-01]
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High-pressure gas-saturated elastomers experience cavity nucleation, inflation, and deflation during rapid decompression, causing internal damage. Fluorescently tagged model elastomers reveal 3D crack damage, aiding in understanding and predicting material damage mechanisms and optimizing material performance.
Elastomers saturated with gas at high pressure suffer from cavity nucleation, inflation, and deflation upon rapid or explosive decompression. Although this process often results in undetectable changes in appearance, it causes internal damage, hampers functionality (e.g., permeability), and shortens lifetime. Here, we tag a model poly(ethyl acrylate) elastomer with pi-extended anthracene-maleimide adducts that fluoresce upon network chain scission, and map in 3D the internal damage present after a cycle of gas saturation and rapid decompression. Interestingly, we observe that each cavity observable during decompression results in a damaged region, the shape of which reveals a fracture locus of randomly oriented penny-shape cracks (i.e., with a flower-like morphology) that contain crack arrest lines. Thus, cavity growth likely proceeds discontinuously (i.e., non-steadily) through the stable and unstable fracture of numerous 2D crack planes. This non-destructive methodology to visualize in 3D molecular damage in polymer networks is novel and serves to understand how fracture occurs under complex 3D loads, predict mechanical aging of pristine looking elastomers, and holds potential to optimize cavitation-resistance in soft materials.
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