Figure 10.

Conformations of the epoxy at the onset of fracture under uniaxial tension boundary conditions (a) and under compact tension boundary conditions applied using the HMM (b), and at equilibrium (c) for reference. The deformations applied in (a) and (b) correspond to the strain tensors shown in figure 9. These configurations are obtained from the same replica of the atomistic system which contains 38 611 atoms. The carbon atoms appear in grey, the nitrogen atoms in yellow, the oxygen atoms in red and the hydrogen atoms in pink. The two tension set-up displays highly contrasted conformational changes in the final state of the atomistic system, in particular void growth is more dispersed with the compact tension set-up, potentially exhibiting two orthogonal crack planes.