Bone is more difficult to break than to split. Although this is well known, and many studies exist on the behaviour of long cracks in bone, there is a need for data on the orientation-dependent crack-growth resistance behaviour of human cortical bone that accurately assesses its toughness at appropriate size scales. Here, we use in situ mechanical testing to examine how physiologically pertinen...

A method is devised for estimating the potential permeability of fracture networks from attributes of fractures observed in outcrop. The technique, which is intended as a complement to traditional approaches, is based on type curves that represent various combinations of fracture lengths, fracture orientations and proportions (i.e., intensities) of fractures that participate in flow. Numerical ...

Mechanisms influencing the plane-strain fracture toughness behavior of commercial aluminum-lithium alloys at cryogenic temperatures are investigated as a function of microstructure and plate orientation. It is confirmed that certain alloys show a marked increase in tensile ductility and toughness with decrease in temperature, although such behavior is not found in the short-transverse orientati...

An important application of 3-D converted P to S-waves (PS-waves) is to exploit S-wave birefringence (splitting) for delineating reservoir fractures. In azimuthally anisotropic media, fracture intensities and orientations are directly related to traveltime differences between the fast and slow S-wave and the polarization direction of the fast S-wave, respectively. Analysis techniques to help ch...

Here, we show how the mechanical properties of a thick-shelled tropical seed are adapted to permit them to germinate while preventing their predation. The seed has evolved a complex heterogeneous microstructure resulting in hardness, stiffness and fracture toughness values that place the structure at the intersection of these competing selective constraints. Analyses of different damage mechani...

When examining a rock mass, joint sets and their orientations can play a signiŽ cant role with regard to how the rock mass will behave. To identify joint sets present in the rock mass, the orientation of individual fracture planes can be measured on exposed rock faces and the resulting data can be examined for heterogeneity. In this article, the expectation–maximization algorithm is used to Ž t...

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...

History matching of a stochastic model of field-scale fractures: methodology and case study — This paper focuses on the history matching of stochastic models of large-scale fractures under seismic resolution, namely sub-seismic faults and fracture swarms. First, we propose an object-based stochastic model for describing geological features of large-scale fractures. This model accounts for stati...

A reliable electromagnetic (EM) means of detecting and delineating geothermal fracture systems would facilitate geothermal reservoir development. To this end, there have been rapid advances in our geophysical capability to gather extensive electromagnetic data sets and to generate elaborate numerical simulations mapping electrical conductivity distributions to electromagnetic field responses. H...

X-Ray Diffraction Contrast Tomography (DCT) is a recently developed, non-destructive synchrotron imaging technique which characterizes microstructure and grain orientation in polycrystalline materials in three dimensions (3D). By combining it with propagation based Phase Contrast Tomography (PCT) it is possible to get a full picture description for the analysis of local crack growth rate of sho...