research

From an engineering point of view, prediction of fatigue crack nucleation in automotive rubber parts is an essential prerequisite for the design of new components. We have derived a new predictor for fatigue crack nucleation in rubber. It is motivated by microscopic mechanisms induced by fatigue and developed in the framework of Configurational Mechanics. As the occurrence of macroscopic fatigue cracks is the consequence of the growth of pre-existing microscopic defects, the energy release rate of these flaws need to be quantified. It is shown that this microstructural evolution is governed by the smallest eigenvalue of the configurational (Eshelby) stress tensor. Indeed, this quantity appears to be a relevant multiaxial fatigue predictor under proportional loading conditions. Then, its generalization to non-proportional multiaxial fatigue problems is derived. Results show that the present predictor, which covers the previously published predictors, is capable to unify multiaxial fatigue data.

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.

This paper shows that the stress field in the classical theory of continuum mechanics
may be taken to be a covector-valued differential two-form. The balance laws and other funda-
mental laws of continuum mechanics may be neatly rewritten in terms of this geometric stress. A

Since Dec. 2006, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC) has set up a biophysics research team that comprises research scientists in the fields of biophysics, solid mechanics and fluid mechanics, and has kicked off the "Computational Cancer Mechanics" project.

How to measure the temperature of a nanotube?