Fragmentation

Brittle materials fragment when exploded or under impact. The study of fragmentation is of practical importance in many areas, ranging from archaeology to milling. In the last 10 years much progress has been achieved in the understanding of the fragment size and velocity distributions as function of the total energy, the geometry and the material strength. Scaling laws, analogous to those of critical phenomena, have been formulated. Recent experiments of exploding egg shells and Christmas balls have given insight also into the fragmentation of containers. For the case of shells, new critical exponents are obtained. These results are confirmed by numerical simulations. These laws are important to understand space debris.