The fracture of highly deformable soft materials is of great practical importance in a wide
range of technological applications, emerging in fields such as soft robotics, stretchable …

Quantitative characterization of the energy dissipation zone around a crack tip is the focal
point in the fracture mechanics of soft materials. In this report, we present a …

Unfilled elastomers often suffer from poor fracture resistance at high temperature where
viscoelastic dissipation is low. A molecular design based on multiple interpenetrating …

Double network (DN) gels, consisting of two contrasting interpenetrated polymer networks,
exhibit large resistances to crack initiation and propagation. For practical applications, crack …

Artificial meat is a promising solution to the negative impacts of meat consumption on natural
resources, public health, and animal welfare. Inspired by the use of framework, scaffold, and …

Double-network gels are a class of tough soft materials comprising two elastic networks with
contrasting structures. The formation of a large internal damage zone ahead of the crack tip …

When brittle hydrogels fail, several mechanisms conspire to alter the state of stress near the
tip of a crack, and it is challenging to identify which mechanism is dominant. In the fracture of …

Double-network (DN) hydrogels are tough soft materials, and the high fracture resistance
can be attributed to the formation of a large damage zone (internal fracture of the brittle first …

The fracture of materials can take place below the critical failure condition via the slow
accumulation of internal damage followed by fast crack propagation. While failure due to …

Many biological hydrogels possess remarkable mechanical performances under both quasi-
static and impact loadings, yet such mechanical robustness over a wide range of strain rates …