fracture mechanics

 It is a common technique in modelling cracked bodies with finite element method, to refine the mesh near the crack tip. It is mentioned in text books, mesh refinement is nessecary to increase the acuuracy of the computed stress intensity factor for the crack tip. Is meshrefinement nessecary for computing eigen-properties ( natural frequencies and natural modes ) as well as SIF? or eigen properties are not affected much by the near crack tip field?

CSIRO Petroleum in Melbourne, Australia, welcomes applications to a Postdoctoral Fellowship
in hydraulic fracture stimulation mechanics. The successful candidate
will have a background in applied mechanics and numerical methods with
an interest in verifying numerical calculations by experiment.  The
research results will be applied to stimulation of hot fractured rock
geothermal reservoirs.

The Adhesion Society will hold its 32nd Annual Meeting in Savannah, GA February 15-18, 2009; uniting chemists, physicists, mechanists, engineers, and biologists concerned with the design and characterization of materials interfaces and their associated property of adhesion.  Adhesion and interfacial constrol are key to the development of nano- and bio- based technologies as well structural and cosmetic applications that influence society in everyday life. 

As a follow up to my first blog , I would like to know if the experimental data of applied loads and crack sizes or lengths, are sufficient to model the R-curve behaviour via the Fracture Mechanics approach.

ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company has immediate openings in Computational Geomechanics and Rock Physics at its Corporate Strategic Research Laboratory in Annandale, NJ. 

To be considered, applicants must satisfy the requirements described in the attached flyer and submit a cover letter and resume directly to the ExxonMobil website (www.exxonmobil.com/ex).

The 5th International Conference on Fracture of Polymers, Composites and Adhesives will be held in the beautiful Alpine village of Les Diablerets, Switzerland, 7-11 September. Les Diablerets is situated 120 km from Geneva's international airport and is easily reached either by car or by public transport.

The full oral and poster programs, as well as registration details can be found on the conference website at www.tc4pca.elsevier.com

I am pleased to announce that Volume 1, Number 2 of the the recently-launched Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials (www.elsevier.com/locate/jmbbm) has been published by Elsevier. All JMBBM articles can be accessed free-of-charge on ScienceDirect until September 2008 (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/17516161).