Why cutting is easier than tearing elastomers

Donghao Zhao, Alex Cartier, Tetsuharu Narita, Frederic Lechenault, Costantino Creton () and Matteo Ciccotti ()
Additional contact information
Donghao Zhao: PSL University
Alex Cartier: PSL University
Tetsuharu Narita: PSL University
Frederic Lechenault: Université Paris Cité
Costantino Creton: PSL University
Matteo Ciccotti: PSL University

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Tearing tough soft solids such as rubbers, leather or meat is much harder than cutting them with a sharp blade. To understand why, we use samples labeled with mechanically sensitive fluorophores to investigate cutting and fracture behavior in PDMS elastomers and quantify the extent of bond scission resulting from cutting pre-stretched samples. Our findings reveal that stretch-induced cracks produce significant deformation, bond scission and blunting near the crack tip, requiring more energy to propagate. In contrast, using blades reduces the amount of stretching and blunting required for crack propagation, resulting in a lower fracture energy. The measured linear correlation between fracture energy and the areal density of broken chains clarifies the relationship between pre-stretching, blunting, and molecular damage. These multi-scale insights demonstrate the key differences between fracture and cutting mechanics of soft materials, allowing to optimize engineering applications, such as rubber and food processing, energy-efficient recycling, biomedical and surgical devices, protective equipment and sports gear.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58483-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-58483-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58483-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().