This paper was to verify the STAGS (general shell, geometric and material nonlinear) code and the critical crack-tip-opening angle (CTOA) fracture criterion for predicting stable tearing in cracked panels that fail with severe out-of-plane buckling. Materials considered ranged from brittle to ductile behavior. Test data used in this study are reported elsewhere. The STAGS code was used to model...

The propagation of cracks in graded materials under monotonic and cyclic loading was investigated via experiment and simulation. Graded alumina/epoxy composite specimens exhibiting a variation in composition from 5% to 65% epoxy, representing a twenty-fold variation in Young’s modulus, across a region of width between 6 and 20 mm, were produced by a multistep infiltration technique. Crack initi...

Post-earthquake structural safety is evaluated manually by certified construction inspectors and structural engineers. They inspect visible damage (e.g. cracks) on critical structural elements (e.g. concrete columns). This process is time-consuming and costly. In order to automate this type of visual inspection, several damage detection methods have been developed. However, most of them can onl...

A thorough examination of the quasi-static penetration of a floating elastic-brittle plate via a fracture mechanics approach has been presented by Bažant and Kim. Bažant and Kim reach the conclusion that there is a size effect (in terms of the plate thickness, h). A few of the assumptions made by these authors will be examined in this discussion. The formulation presented by Bažant and Kim assu...

We present an experimental investigation of fracture in self-assembled gold nanoparticle mono- and multilayers attached to elastomer substrates and subjected to tensile stress. Imaging the fracture patterns down to the scale of single particles provides detailed information about the crack width distribution and allows us to compare the scaling of the average crack spacing as a function of stra...

Miniaturized, wireless instrumentation is now a reality and this paper describes development of such a system to monitor crack response. Comparison of environmental (long-term) and blast-induced (dynamic) crack width changes in residential structures has lead to a new approach to monitoring and controlling construction vibrations. A low power consumption potentiometer displacement transducer an...

A B S T R A C T Various analogies have recently been proposed for comparing the stress fields induced in fretting fatigue contact situations, with those of a crack and a sharp or a rounded notch, resulting in a degree of uncertainty over which model is most appropriate in a given situation. However, a simple recent approach of Atzori–Lazzarin for infinite-life fatigue design in the presence of ...

Phase-field models for crack propagation enable the simulation of complex crack patterns without complex and expensive tracking and remeshing as cracks grow. In the setting without inertia, the crack evolution is obtained from a variational energetic starting point, and leads to an equation for the order parameter coupled to elastostatics. Careful mathematical analysis has shown that this is co...

A self-healing fiber-reinforced structural polymer matrix composite material is demonstrated. In the composite, a microencapsulated healing agent and a solid chemical catalyst are dispersed within the polymer matrix phase. Healing is triggered by crack propagation through the microcapsules, which then release the healing agent into the crack plane. Subsequent exposure of the healing agent to th...