Defect tolerance in soft materials

The ability of materials to withstand defects like cracks, notches or generic geometric discontinuities, is usually indicated as flaw tolerance, and is a crucial aspect of the safety assessment of structural components. Flaw tolerance in soft materials can be substantially different from that in traditional ones. As a matter of fact, the capacity of highly deformable materials to undergo large deformations with a significant rearrangement of the molecular network at the miscroscale in highly stressed regions can enhance such an ability, leading to an erroneous underestimation of their safety level against defect-driven failure, if traditional methods of analysis are employed. In the present research work, the mechanics of highly deformable notched plates is considered from the fail-safety point-of-view. Experimental, numerical and theoretical remarks are made in order to explain the mechanism of defect resistance in such a class of materials from a physically-based point-of-view.