Microstructural controls of anticrack nucleation in highly porous brittle solids.

Porous brittle solids have the ability to collapse and fail even under compressive stresses. In fracture mechanics, this singular behavior, often referred to as anticrack, demands for appropriate continuum models to predict the catastrophic failure. To identify universal controls of anticracks, we link the microstructure of a porous solid with its yield surface at the onset of plastic flow. We utilize an assembly method for porous structures, which allows to independently vary microstructural properties (density and coordination number) and perform discrete element simulations under mixed-mode (shear-compression) loading. In rescaled stress coordinates, the concurrent influence of the microstructural properties can be cast into a universal, ellipsoidal form of the yield surface that reveals an associative plastic flow rule, as a common feature of these materials. Our results constitute a constructive approach for continuum modeling of anticrack nucleation and propagation in highly porous brittle, engineering and geo-materials.