OBJECTIVES To compare demographic, HIV risk behaviors, and health status characteristics of injection drug users (IDUs) who have injected "crack" cocaine with IDUs who have not. METHODS Nine hundred and eighty-nine IDUs were recruited in New Haven, CT, Hartford, CT and Springfield, MA from January 2000 to May 2002. Participants were administered a modified version of the National Institute on...

Cracks and craze lines are often observed in the enamel of human teeth, but they rarely cause tooth fracture. The present study evaluates fatigue crack growth in human enamel, and compares that to the fatigue response of sintered hydroxyapatite (HAp) with similar crystallinity, chemistry and density. Miniature inset compact tension (CT) specimens were prepared that embodied a small piece of ena...

Dynamic crack growth along a bimaterial interface under impact shear loading is analyzed numerically. The material on each side of the bond line is characterized by an isotropic hyperelastic constitutive relation. A cohesive surface constitutive relation is also speci®ed that relates the tractions and displacement jumps across the bond line and that allows for the creation of new free surface. ...

A study has been made of the fatigue-crack propagation properties of a series of laminated Nbreinforced Nb3Al intermetallic-matrix composites with varying microstructural scale but nominally identical reinforcement volume fraction (20 pct Nb). It was found that resistance to fatigue-crack growth improved with increasing metallic layer thickness (in the range 50 to 250 mm) both in the crack-divi...

This article presents predictive modeling of nonlinear guided wave propagation for structural health monitoring using both finite element method and analytical approach. In our study, the nonlinearity of the guided waves is generated by interaction with a nonlinear breathing crack. Two nonlinear finite element method techniques are used to simulate the breathing crack: (a) element activation/de...

In this paper, the general plane problem for an infinite strip containing multiple cracks perpendicular to its boundaries is considered. The problem is reduced to a system of singular integral equations. Two specific problems of practical interest are then studied in detail. The first is the investigation of the interaction effect of multiple edge cracks in a plate or beam under tension or bend...

Cracks are dangerous and frequently observed defects in steel structures. Therefore, the understanding of the mechanism of crack is very important to structure safety. Although the mechanism of static crack has been widely studied by researchers, the mechanism of dynamic crack has been left out and seldom been discussed. In this paper, a modeling method for acoustic emission (AE) source of dyna...

Boundary element method (BEM) is a powerful computational tool for analysing piezoelectric problems. The BEM has been so well developed during the past 40 years that it has been considered as a very popular computational tool. This method consists of formulating the engineering problem in terms of an integral equations relating only boundary values and determining its solutions numerically. Thu...