Discussion of fracture paper #43 - Fracture Mechanics Contributes to Averting Our Planetary Climate Change Crisis

Fracture mechanics suddenly provides a step forward to stop climate change. The blogger has often pictured us humans walking on earth, asking ourselves how to get sufficient energy without burning fossil oil and destroying forests. Earth has a crust that is 30 to 50 km thick. Below it, the temperature is 1 to 6 thousand degrees Celsius. We are on the outside of a thin shell and inside is mostly melted rock, forming a sphere with a diameter that is close to 13000 km. For someone seeing this from another solar system, our behaviour must seem strange and pathetic. We have to look inward. 

The selected paper is a published article preview that may help us take the first step:

"Energy storage characteristics and damage constitutive model of thermally treated granite: An experimental investigation" by Jiexin Ma, Tubin Yin, You Wu, Wenxuan Guo, Yongjun Chen and Zheng Yang, in Engineering Fracture Mechanics, vol. 314 (2025) 110679.

The paper provides good reasons to start planning the exploration of geothermal energy. Even though the paper is published as a preview, it offers easy reading and a nice presentation of experimental results. 

To obtain a practical energy form, we may use hot water for direct heating of houses and a large variety of objects, and use the Seebeck effect to produce carbon dioxide-free electricity. 

Considering that this is an article preview, the undersigned wishes to point to two minor observations: 1) There are some unusual math symbols that the blogger did not understand. The multiplications of scalar quantities are indicated by symbols in three versions, i.e. ∗, ×, and ⦁ . It would be interesting to know if there are any differences between them. 2) Next is the "Data availability" statement that "The authors do not have permission to share data.". This seems unnecessary for two reasons, i.e. by first reducing the trustworthiness, and second, because all necessary data is already available from figures and tables. The blogger would just write, "Yes, data is shared". I am eagerly waiting for the final version of an important paper.

It would be interesting to hear from anyone who would like to discuss or provide comments or thoughts, regarding the subject, the method, or anything related. Perhaps the authors can cast some light on future actions regarding the subject.

If anyone wishes to comment and does not have an iMechanica account, please register to be able to file a comment. Registration very often fails. If it doesn't work, don't worry just email me the text at per.stahle@solid.lth.se and I will post your comments in your name. 

If the selected paper is not already published with open access, it will be given open access within a couple of days and remain for several months.

With wishes of a Happy New Year,

Per Ståhle (for ESIS)