The effects of grain-boundary chemistry on the mechanical properties of a high-purity silicon nitride ceramics were investigated, with specific emphasis on the role of oxygen. Variations in the grain-boundary oxygen content, through control of oxidizing heat treatments and sintering additives, was found to result in a transition in fracture mechanism from transgranular to intergranular fracture...

The marginal fracture toughness of several types of composite resins was determined by means of the rattler test. Microparticle-filled resins showed significantly higher marginal fracture toughness than conventional composites. Posterior restorative composites were intermediate between MFRs and conventional composites. Amalgams were inferior to restorative resins. These data correspond with the...

The fracture toughness, K IC, of a cortical bone has been experimentally determined by several researchers. The variation of K IC values occurs from the variation of specimen orientation, shape, and size during the experiment. The fracture toughness of a cortical bone is governed by the severest flaw and, hence, may be analyzed using Weibull statistics. To the best of the authors' knowledge, ho...

. AbstrAct Objective. In clinical practice, core material can be exposed after adjustments, which may result in loss of ceramic glaze. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of surface roughness on the flexural strength and fracture toughness of In-Ceram zirconia core material. Materials and methods. Forty In-Ceram zirconia specimens were prepared and divided into two main groups...

The majority of fracture mechanics studies on the toughness of bone have been performed under tensile loading. However, it has recently been shown that the toughness of human cortical bone in the transverse (breaking) orientation is actually much lower in shear (mode II) than in tension (mode I); a fact that is physiologically relevant as in vivo bone is invariably loaded multiaxially. Since bo...

An experiment was carried out in order to locate and quantify osteon types within a sample of cortical bone taken from a human tibia. This was done using a microscope-camera assembly and the BioQuant computer software. The results of this were correlated with a previous experiment's results on fracture toughness so that an analysis could be run on the data in order to determine the factors that...

BACKGROUND This study compared two well-known computer-aided-design/computer-aided-manufactured (CAD/CAM) blocks (Paradigm MZ100 [3M ESPE] and Vitablocs Mark II [Vita] in terms of fracture toughness (Kic), index of brittleness (BI) and stress/strain distributions. MATERIAL AND METHODS Three-point bending test was used to calculate the fracture toughness, and the relationship between the Kic a...

Any fracture process ultimately involves the rupture of atomic bonds. Processes at the atomic scale therefore critically influence the toughness and overall fracture behavior of materials. Atomistic simulationmethods including large-scalemolecular dynamics simulations with classical potentials, density functional theory calculations and advanced concurrent multiscale methods have led to new ins...