Publications by Thibault Didier Roch

A finite geometry, inertia assisted coarsening-to-complexity transition in homogeneous frictional systems

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch

The emergence of statistical complexity in frictional systems (where nonlinearity and dissipation are confined to an interface), manifested in broad distributions of various observables, is not yet understood. We study this problem in velocity-driven, homo ...

2024

Dynamic Crack-Front Deformations in Cohesive Materials

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch

Crack fronts deform due to heterogeneities, and inspecting these deformations can reveal local variations of material properties, and help predict out-of-plane damage. Current models neglect the influence of a finite dissipation length scale behind the cra ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2023

Friction and fracture: richness and complexity in dynamic rupture

Thibault Didier Roch

Understanding how things break and slide is of paramount importance to describe the dynamics of a broad range of physical systems. This includes day-to-day problems such as the breaking of a glass of wine or the sliding of skis on snow, but also engineerin ...

EPFL2023

The dynamics of unsteady frictional slip pulses

Thibault Didier Roch, Fabian Barras

Self-healing slip pulses are major spatiotemporal failure modes of frictional systems, featuring a characteristic size L(t) and a propagation velocity c(p)(t) (t is time). Here, we develop a theory of slip pulses in realistic rate- and state-dependent fric ...

National Academy of Sciences2023

Quasi-static crack front deformations in cohesive materials

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain

When a crack interacts with material heterogeneities, its front distorts and adopts complex tortuous configurations that are reminiscent of the energy barriers encountered during crack propagation. As such, the study of crack front deformations is key to r ...

2022

cRacklet: a spectral boundary integral method library for interfacial rupture simulation

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch, Fabian Barras

The study of dynamically propagating rupture along interfaces is of prime importance in various fields and system sizes, including tribology (nm to m), engineering (mm to m) and geophysics (m to km) (Armstrong-Hélouvry et al., 1994; Ben-Zion, 2008; Vanossi ...

2022

Earthquake Nucleation along Faults with Heterogeneous Weakening Rate

Jean-François Molinari, Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Thibault Didier Roch, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain

The transition from quasi-static slip growth to dynamic rupture propagation constitutes one possible scenario to describe earthquake nucleation. If this transition is rather well understood for homogeneous faults, how the friction properties of multiscale ...

2021

Velocity-driven frictional sliding: Coarsening and steady-state pulses

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch

Frictional sliding is an intrinsically complex phenomenon, emerging from the interplay between driving forces, elasto-frictional instabilities, interfacial nonlinearity and dissipation, material inertia and bulk geometry. We show that homogeneous rate-and- ...

2022

Stick-slip phenomena and Schallamach waves captured using reversible cohesive elements

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch, Evelyne Pélagie Ringoot

Reversibility is of paramount importance in the correct representation of surface peeling in various physical settings, ranging from motility in nature, to gripping devices in robotic applications, and even to sliding of tectonic plates. Modeling the detac ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2021

The emergence of crack-like behavior of frictional rupture: Edge singularity and energy balance

Jean-François Molinari, Thibault Didier Roch, Fabian Barras

The failure of frictional interfaces - the process of frictional rupture - is widely assumed to feature crack-like properties, with far-reaching implications for various disciplines, ranging from engineering tribology to earthquake physics. An important co ...

ELSEVIER2020