grassl's blog

At the School of Engineering at the University of Glasgow, there is a position open for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in the area of Mechanics and Materials (experimental or computational).

Have a look at:

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AKO520/lecturer-senior-lecturer/

PhD position at the University of Glasgow on “Modelling of geo-engineered barriers for underground nuclear waste storage”

There are two PhD studentships available at the University of Glasgow in the area of computational fracture mechanics of concrete.

The topics are multiscale modelling of corrosion induced cracking and meso-mechanically motivated nonlocal models for fracture. 

Please visit my webpage at http://www.civil.gla.ac.uk/~grassl for more information.

All the best,

Peter Grassl

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.