Explosive fragmentation of Prince Rupert's drops leads to well-defined fragment sizes.

ABSTRACT: Anyone who has ever broken a dish or a glass knows that the resulting fragments range from roughly the size of the object all the way down to indiscernibly small pieces: typical fragment size distributions of broken brittle materials follow a power law, and therefore lack a characteristic length scale. The origin of this power-law behavior is still unclear, especially why it is such an universal feature. Here we study the explosive fragmentation of glass Prince Rupert's drops, and uncover a fundamentally different breakup mechanism. The Prince Rupert's drops explode due to their large internal stresses resulting in an exponential fragment size distribution with a well-defined fragment size. We demonstrate that generically two distinct breakup processes exist, random and hierarchical, that

SUBMITTER: Kooij S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8097073 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature