brittle fracture

Sharing a new article "Finite element implementation of Field Crack Mechanics for brittle and ductile fracture" by my Ph.D. student BVSS Bharadwaja at IIT Bombay, which has been accepted for publication in Theoretical and Applied Fracture Mechanics. Also see attached. Thanks to Prof. Amit Acharya for the motivation and discussion.

The Journal Club for April 2021 presents a concise review of the so-called variational phase-field fracture theory for brittle and cohesive fracture. Topics include the pioneering work of Griffith on brittle fracture in 1920, Barenblatt's cohesive zone model in 1959, to Marigo/Francfort's variational formulation of Griffith's brittle fracture 78 years later and the Bourdin's phase-field regularisation of MF's model. Also discussed is recent models for cohesive fracture, the role of the length scale parameter, solver for the coupled PDEs and some applications.

A Postdoctoral fellowship is available at The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, U.S.A. in the area of fracture and fragmentation under dynamic loading conditions. The potential candidate should have a Ph.D. in an engineering discipline, a strong background in fracture mechanics and extensive computational modeling experience working with the finite element methods or some other numerical method with application to solid mechanics.

The word "extreme" seems to be "trending" a lot these days, see the recent discussions on the new journal Extreme Mechanics Letters.

My collaborator Ruben Sevilla at Swansea and I were interested in very curved crack paths that develop in nature and have been replicated experimentally in thin films attached to elastic substrates.

Adv. Funct. Mater.  DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201101224

I found an interesting paper on the arXiv website that may interest some mechanicians.  Markus

Title:  Brittle fracture down to femto-Joules — and below

Authors: J. Astrom, P.C.F. Di Stefano, F. Probst, L. Stodolsky, J. Timonen