A novel method for preparing and testing bending specimens in-situ the TEM has been developed. This method provides high visibility of the crack front and its associated plastic zone. This is significant because energy release rates can now be calculated at many points throughout the test based on crack tip opening displacement (CTOD), crack opening angle (COA), and crack advance. Further refin...

In this work, the plastic deformation mechanisms responsible for mechanical properties and fracture toughness in nanotwinned (NT) magnesium is studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The influence of twin boundary (TBs) spacing and crack position on deformation behaviors are investigated. The microstructure evolution at the crack tip are not exactly the same for the left edge crack (LEC)...

Analysis has been performed on fracture initiation near a crack in a brittle material with strength described by Weibull statistics. This nonlocal fracture model allows for a direct correlation between near crack-tip stresses and failure. Predictions are made for both the toughness and average fracture initiation angle of a crack under mixed-mode loading. This is pertinent for composites and is...

We report on the in situ, time resolved, observation of solidification cracking in a thin sample of an Al-15wt%Sn alloy at ESRF BM05. During the experiment, solidification cracking was seen to occur during natural cooling of the sample at a solid fraction of ∼95%, between directionally agglomerated dendritic networks. Through detailed analysis, three stages of crack growth were observed: crack ...

Underwater dam crack detection and classification based on sonar images is a challenging task because underwater environments are complex and because cracks are quite random and diverse in nature. Furthermore, obtainable sonar images are of low resolution. To address these problems, a novel underwater dam crack detection and classification approach based on sonar imagery is proposed. First, the...

Fracture of ceramic materials has been one of the most frequently reported complications for all-ceramic restorations. The aim of the study was to analyze the fracture features of hot-pressed ceramic crowns in order to evaluate areas susceptible to crack initiation and crack propagation correlated with stress areas. The crowns were inspected visually to determine the shape and orientation of th...

A planar crack generically segments into an array of "daughter cracks" shaped as tilted facets when loaded with both a tensile stress normal to the crack plane (mode I) and a shear stress parallel to the crack front (mode III). We investigate facet propagation and coarsening using in situ microscopy observations of fracture surfaces at different stages of quasistatic mixed-mode crack propagatio...

A large area electronics in the form of a soft elastomeric capacitor (SEC) has shown great promise as a strain sensor for fatigue crack monitoring in steel structures. The SEC sensors are inexpensive, easy to fabricate, highly stretchable, and mechanically robust. It is a highly scalable technology, capable of monitoring deformations on mesoscale systems. Preliminary experiments verified the SE...

In this work, a new approach is developed for dynamic analysis of a composite beam with an interplay crack, in which a physically impossible interpenetration of the crack faces is prevented by imposing a special constraint, leading to taking account of a force of contact interaction of the crack faces and to nonlinearity of the formulated boundary value problem. Longitudinal force resultants in...

The results of a numerical study of the nonlinear response of thin unstiffened aluminum cylindrical shells with a longitudinal crack are presented. The shells are analyzed with a nonlinear shell analysis code that accurately accounts for global and structural response phenomena. The effects of initial crack length on the prebuckling, buckling and postbuckling responses of a typical shell subjec...