  A theoretical and experimental study of the fragmentation of closed thin
shells made of a disordered brittle material is presented. Experiments were
performed on brown and white hen egg-shells under two different loading
conditions: fragmentation due to an impact with a hard wall and explosion by a
combustion mixture giving rise to power law fragment size distributions. For
the theoretical investigations a three-dimensional discrete element model of
shells is constructed. Molecular dynamics simulations of the two loading cases
resulted in power law fragment mass distributions in satisfactory agreement
with experiments. Based on large scale simulations we give evidence that power
law distributions arise due to an underlying phase transition which proved to
be abrupt and continuous for explosion and impact, respectively. Our results
demonstrate that the fragmentation of closed shells defines a universality
class different from that of two- and three-dimensional bulk systems.
