It appears to me that there is more and more research done on discrete approaches to modelling fracture.

Especially for brittle or quasi-brittle materials these methods are undergoing a revival.

I am not sure why this is the case. I am also not in the position to judge if this revival is useful.

I just had recently a look at some of these models and I found these discrete models to be suitable

for description of fracture in heterogeneous materials, where cracks appear at many different positions.

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Dear colleagues,

Experimental nanomechanics is a frequently discussed topic on imechanica, see e.g. the very active monthly topics by Xiaodong Li, Julia Greer and Wei Cai.

Continuing on this, I would like to draw your attention to a paper we recently published:

"In situ observation of dislocation nucleation and escape in a submicrometre aluminium single crystal" by Sang Ho Oh, Marc Legros, Daniel Kiener & Gerhard Dehm (http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v8/n2/abs/nmat2370.html).

Howard A. Stone, of Harvard University, is elected to the National Academy of Engineering, for the development of fundamental concepts and novel applications in microfluidics and for improving the understanding of small-scale, viscous-flow phenomena.  Here is the full list of members elected in 2009.

We welcome applications for a 4 year PhD positon in the field of computational mechanics and materials science. Further details in the attachment.

In the literature, FEM has sometimes been characterized as a local approach, but IMO this needs to be corrected.



The piecewise continuous trial-functions of FEM can be looked at from two different viewpoints:

Last fall, Elsevier launched SciTopics. It is a web site devoted to providing research summaries of current topics by experts, allowing for public interaction through comments.  Anyone can become a member and post comments, or request to author a page. 

 In many ways, it resembles iMechanica.  Authors pen SciTopic pages in their area of expertise.  SciTopics leverages Scirus , which is Elsevier's free, science-specific search engine.

I am writing user-defined element using ANSYS. Are any general guidelines available? Kindly help me.

Subramanian 

It has been quite some time (more than 1.5 years) that I had touched upon the topic of the physical bases of FEM in general, and of the general weighted residual (WR) approach in particular, at iMechanica (see here).

The position I then took was that there is no known physical basis at all for the WR approach---despite its loving portrayals in mathematical terms, or its popularity.