Every acceleration or deceleration causes inertia forces and as a consequence elastic waves. Of course, such dynamic loading situations often occur in structural applications of materials. The consequences of such dynamic loading on designing with ceramics are considered on the example of a new dynamic tension test. First, the test device is described, and the resulting loading situation is car...

Most of the existing concrete dams are subjected to cracking. These cracks are caused by various factors such as construction practices, curing, loads and volume change of mass concrete which reduce the efficiency, failure or instability of concrete dams. Using fracture mechanics as a new method to estimate stability and durability of concrete dams is recommended in scientific publications in w...

Previous studies on elastic wave propagation in fractured media have demonstrated that a single planar fracture supports fracture interface waves and that two plane parallel fractures support fracture channel waves. Here, the results are presented for plane wave propagation through an infinite number of plane parallel fractures with equal fracture spacing and fracture stiffnesses. Analysis of t...

Plate impact experiments are conducted to study the dynamic fracture processes in 4340 VAR steel which occur on submicrosecond timescales. These experiments involve the plane strain loading of a planar crack by a plane tensile pulse with a duration of approximately 1 /xs. The loading is achieved by impacting a precracked, disk-shaped specimen by a thin flyer plate. Motion of the rear surface of...

We have carried out systematic fracture experiments in a single edge notch geometry over a range of stretch rates on dual crosslink hydrogels made from polyvinyl alcohol chains chemically crosslinked with glutaraldehyde and physically crosslinked with borate ions. If the energy release rate necessary for crack propagation was calculated conventionally, by using the work done to deform the sampl...

The authors have been developing a crack propagation analysis system that can deal with arbitrary shaped cracks in threedimensional solids. The system is consisting of mesh generation software, a large-scale finite element analysis program and a fracture mechanics module. To evaluate the stress intensity factors, a Virtual Crack Closure-Integral Method (VCCM) for the second-order tetrahedral fi...

We propose in this contribution to investigate the link between the dynamic gradient damage model and the classical Griffith’s theory of dynamic fracture during the crack propagation phase. To achieve this main objective, we first rigorously reformulate two-dimensional linear elastic dynamic fracture problems using variational methods and shape derivative techniques. The classical equation of m...

Even though friction affects everyday life in many ways, it is still one of the biggest mysteries of physics. Friction is a truly multi-scale phenomenon with a large variety of processes acting at various length and time scales. In recent years, much attention was paid to the microand nano-scale properties of frictional interfaces in order to uncover the origins of friction. The structural aspe...