A crack trapping model is developed for the fracture resistance of high-angle grain boundaries in free-standing brittle thin films, based on which a new size effect is predicted. In addition to the crystallographic misorientations, the grain boundary toughness is also dependent on the film thickness, primarily due to the geometrically necessary crack front branching. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All righ...

Interfacial fracture toughness and cyclic fatigue-crack growth properties of joints made from 99.5% pure alumina partially transient liquid-phase bonded using copper/niobium/copper interlayers have been investigated at both room and elevated temperatures, and assessed in terms of interfacial chemistry and microstructure. The mean interfacial fracture toughness, Gc, was found to decrease from 39...

Final failure of laminated composite structures is preceded by different damage mechanisms involving fracture initiation and propagation. Fracture in a composite laminate can appear either between two plies or within a lamina. In the first case, interlaminar fracture or delamination, the crack causes separation of two adjacent plies and will mainly involve matrix failure or matrix-to-fibre debo...

Finite element method (FEM) is one of the most famous methods which has many applications in varies studies such as the study of crack propagation in engineering structures. However, unless extremely fine meshes are employed, problem arises in accurately modelling the singular stress field in the singular element area around the crack tip. In the present study, the crack growth simulation has b...

The dual boundary element method is formulated for the analysis of linear elastic cracked plates. The dual boundary integral equations of the method are the displacement and the traction equations. When these equations are simultaneously applied along the crack boundaries, general crack problems can be solved in a single-region formulation, with both crack boundaries discretized with discontinu...

Elimination of the ionospheric contribution to atmospheric delays in GPS radio occultation measurements is a key issue in the retrieval of accurate pressure and temperature profiles above the tropopause. The traditional so-called “ionosphere-free” combination of the L1 and L2 phase paths, eliminating the first-order ionospheric effects, is not sufficient because of the nonnegligible bending of ...

a crack depth in mm, same as x â measurement system response, 1 – R– A(x) system model for evolving crack depth x A(n) linearised system model at measurement set n B(x) measurement model giving normalised energy ratio R– as a function of crack depth x B(n) linearised measurement model at measurement set n B(R) inverse measurement model giving crack depth x as a function of normalised energy rat...

Static fatigue behavior is the main failure mode of optical fibers applied in sensors. In this paper, a computational framework based on continuum damage mechanics (CDM) is presented to calculate the crack propagation process and failure time of optical fibers subjected to static bending and tensile loads. For this purpose, the static fatigue crack propagation in the glass core of the optical f...