fracture mechanics

H. Mei, Y. Pang, and R. Huang, International Journal of Fracture 148, 331-342 (2007).

Following a previous effort published in MRS Proceedings, we wrote a journal article of the same title, with more numerical results. While the main conclusions stay the same, a few subtle points are noted in this paper.

The abstract submission deadline for this next conference in the biennial Fatigue Damage of Structural Materials series (www.fatiguedamage.elsevier.com) is 28 November 2007.

The conference will take place will take place in Hyannis, MA, USA, 14-19 September 2008. Hyannis is located on the beautiful Cape Cod peninsula just 90 minutes from Boston's Logan International Airport and T.F.Green Airport in Providence.   

 It seems that within the field of fracture mechanics, some authors use "fracture" to refer to the mechanism of creating new surfaces within a body by breaking the material bonds and reserve the word "crack" for the sharp-tipped discontinuity that results from fracture of a brittle material. But it does not appear that this distinction is followed consistently throughout the literature, and perhaps different research areas within the fracture mechanics field use the two words in different ways.

New students may start from January 2008 if the graduate students have previous research experience in solid mechanics (e.g., nano/micro-mechanics, computational mechanics) or material engineering (MD simulation, mechanical behaviors). Students will have the opportunities to conduct balanced experimental and computational work on the durabilty and impact failure of marine composite materials; failure and material designs of nanocomposite materials; or rehabilitation of infrastructure materials using composites and other materials.  An MS degree is required.

doi: 10.1016/j.engfracmech.2007.08.012 

In the attached manuscript, we have coupled the extended finite element method (X-FEM) to the fast marching method (FMM) for non-planar crack growth simuations. Unlike the level set method, the FMM is ideally-suited to advance a monotonically growing front. The FMM is a single-pass algorithm (no iterations) without any time-step restrictions. The perturbation crack solutions due to Gao and Rice (IJF, 1987) and Lai, Movchan and Rodin (IJF, 2002) are used for the purpose of comparisons.

To: Engineers, Fracture Analysts, Mechanicians, Physicists...

In science and engineering, we have an excellent tradition: naming a physical unit using the name of a prominent personality from the concerned field. For example, in SI system, we measure force in newton, work in joule, power in watt...

But the unit of fracture toughness, i.e. KIC, is too lengthy to pronounce: (mega) pascal-underoot-meter. Further, it has also been in use for something like half a century by now, perhaps more. So, how do you like the idea of giving a name to this unit?

Here is an e-book on Engineering Fracture Mechanics ; you can also download a demo version, the preface, and other related stuff from the page. The idea of the book (as described in the page) sounds interesting:

With the increasing use of shape memory alloys in recent years, it is important to investigate the effect of cracks. Theoretically, the stress field near the crack tip is unbounded. Hence, a stress-induced transformation occurs, and the martensite phase is expected to appear in the neighborhood of the crack tip, from the very first loading step. In that case, the crack tip region is not governed by the far field stress, but rather by the crack tip stress field. This behavior implies transformation toughening or softening.