Owing to a lack of microstructure, glassy materials are inherently strong but brittle, and often demonstrate extreme sensitivity to flaws. Accordingly, their macroscopic failure is often not initiated by plastic yielding, and almost always terminated by brittle fracture. Unlike conventional brittle glasses, metallic glasses are generally capable of limited plastic yielding by shear-band sliding...

Extreme localization of damage in conventional brittle materials is the source a host undesirable effects. We show how artificially engineered metamaterials with constituents can be designed to ensure that every breakable sub-element fails independently. The main role proposed design played by high contrast composite sub-structure zero-stiffness, furnishing nonlocal stress redistribution. abili...

We present a model for the brittle–ductile transition in ferritic steels based on two dimensional discrete dislocation simulations of crack-tip plasticity. The sum of elastic fields of the crack and the emitted dislocations defines an elasto–plastic crack field. Effects of crack-tip blunting of the macrocrack are included in the simulations. The plastic zone characteristics are found to be in a...

Using a worldwide catalog of earthquakes we analyze the distribution of distances between pairs of earthquake hypocenters to determine the spatial fractal dimension 6 of an earthquake fracture. As the time span of the catalog increases, 8 asymptotically reaches the value 2.1-2.2 for shallow earthquakes. Approximately the same asymptotic value of dimension is obtained for a catalog of earthquake...

Title: Crack Growth During Brittle Fracture in Compression. Author: Bartlett W. Paulding, Jr. Submitted to the Department of Geology and Geophysics February 9, 1965 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Photoelastic analysis of several two-crack arrays predicts that compressive fracture is initiated at cra...

This article presents the investigative work conducted on the fracture toughness and microstructure of Al6061-9% graphite particulate composites. The requisite specimens for the fracture toughness testing were compact tension ones prepared using stir casting technique. The Al6061-9% graphite particulate metal matrix composite has been heat treated in the underaged condition. It is observed from...

An in situ quantitative tensile testing platform is developed to enable the uniform in-plane loading of a freestanding membrane of 2D materials inside a scanning electron microscope. The in situ tensile testing reveals the brittle fracture of large-area MoSe2 crystals and measures their fracture strength for the first time.

The effect of static and cyclic loading conditions on the stress corrosion cracking of unidirectional glass reinforced polymer (GRP) rods used in composite high voltage insulator has been investigated. A series of stress corrosion experiments have been performed on unidirectional E-glass/modified polyester composite rods. The rods have been subjected to mechanical tensile static and cyclic stre...