Delamination and fracture of thin films

We present a dimension-reduction result for a variational model, proposed recently by Andres Leon Baldelli, Blaise Bourdin, Jean-Jacques Marigo and Corrado Maurini, for the delamination and fracture of thin films. The setting is that of a thin film bonded to a rigid substrate through a bonding layer. In the limit when both the thickness of the film and the Young's modulus of the bonding layer tend to zero, the linearized three-dimensional elastic energy of the system converges to a simplified two-dimensional energy that determines whether the film prefers either to fracture or to debond from the substrate under the presence of a thermal or a displacement load. This simplified energy is then minimized to numerically simulate the fracture vs. delamination behaviour in certain idealized examples.

This is joint work with Jean-François Babadjian, Andres Leon Baldelli, Blaise Bourdin and Corrado Maurini.