Existing design guidelines for concrete hinges consider bending-induced tensile cracking, but the structural behavior is oversimplified to be time-independent. This is the motivation to study creep and bending-induced tensile cracking of initially monolithic concrete hinges systematically. Material tests on plain concrete specimens and structural tests on marginally reinforced concrete hinges a...

Cross-linked protein crystals (CLPCs) are very useful materials in applications such as biosensors, catalysis, and X-ray crystallography. Hence, preparation of CLPCs is an important research direction. During the preparation of CLPCs, an often encountered problem is that cracks may appear in the crystals, which may finally lead to shattering of the crystals into small pieces and cause problem i...

Researchers are currently developing new value-added uses for almond shells, an abundant agricultural by-product. Almond varieties are distinguished by processors as being either hard or soft shelled, but these two broad classes of almond also exhibit varietal diversity in shell morphology and physical characters. By defining more precisely the physical and chemical characteristics of almond sh...

Solutions are presented for the elastic plane-strain problem of a crack in a coating on a compliant substrate of finite thickness. Analysis of the problem shows that substrate thickness has a significant effect on the steady-state energy release rate for channel cracks. This is so over a wide range of elastic mismatch between film and substrate, but is especially important if the substrate is m...

Corrosion-fatigue, a cracking mechanism in fossil-fueled generating plants, predominately occurs in the water walls and economizers of sub-critical plants. Cracking attributed to corrosion-fatigue has occurred in water wall tubing of both membrane and tangential designs. The occurrence (particularly in membrane water wall tubing) presents a challenge for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) because ...

The cracking resistance of Alloy 600, Alloy 690 and their welds, EN82H and EN52, was characterized by conducting JICtests in air and hydrogenated water. All test materials displayed excellent toughness in air and high temperature water, but Alloy 690 and the two welds were severeiy embrittled in low temperature water. In 54°C water with 150 cc Hz/kg H20, JICvalues were typically 70~o to !35Y0 ]...

Susceptibility of three lean-alloyed ferritic-austenitic stainless steels to hydrogen-induced delayed cracking was examined, concentrating on internal hydrogen contained in the materials after production operations. The aim was to study the role of strain-induced austenite to martensite transformation in the delayed cracking susceptibility. According to the conducted deep drawing tests and cons...

In this paper, the post-cracking tensile behavior of Ultra-High Performance Cementitious Composites (UHPCC) was studied and an improved analytical model to predict the behavior depending on the fiber orientation distribution was proposed. Two different casting methods were adopted to estimate the influence of the casting method on the tensile behavior. The direct tensile test results showed tha...

While Portland cement concrete (PCC) overlay has been increasingly used as a rehabilitation technique for deteriorated PCC pavements in the last decade, reflective cracking places a major limit on its durability performance. The use of ultra ductile concrete named Engineered Cementitious Composite (ECC) should arrest such failure mode and greatly enhance the long term performance of the overlai...

This study attempted to improve upon a previously reported route to room-temperature metallization of a polyimide substrate. The silver(I)-triflate complex used to dope the polymer was replaced with a silver(I)-hexafluoroacetylacetone complex to remove the possibility that residual triflic acid would compromise the structural integrity of the polymer film. The results were initially very promis...