Fracture of Soft Elastic Foam

Consisting of stretchable and flexible cell walls or ligaments, soft elastic foams exhibit extremely high fracture toughness. Using the analogy between the cellular structure and the network structure of rubbery polymers, this paper proposes a scaling law for the fracture energy of soft elastic foam. To verify the scaling law, a phase-field model for the fracture processes in soft elastic structures is developed. The numerical simulations in two-dimensional foam structures of various unit-cell geometries have all achieved good agreement with the scaling law. In addition, the dependences of the macroscopic fracture energy on geometric parameters such as the network connectivity and spatial orientation have also been revealed by the numerical results. To further enhance the fracture toughness, a type of soft foam structures with nonstraight ligaments or folded cell walls has been proposed and its performance studied numerically. Simulations have shown that an effective fracture energy one order of magnitude higher than the base material can be reached by using the soft foam structure.