Advanced ceramics and semiconductors (i.e. SiC, Si, Quartz, etc.) are increasingly being used for industrial applications. These ceramics/semiconductors are hard, strong, inert, and light weight. This combination of properties makes them ideal candidates for tribological, semiconductor, MEMS and optoelectronic applications. Manufacturing these materials without causing surface and subsurface da...

This paper presents two main results. The first result indicates that in materials with broadly distributed microscopic heterogeneities, the fracture strength distribution corresponding to the peak load of the material response does not follow the commonly used Weibull and (modified) Gumbel distributions. Instead, a lognormal distribution describes more adequately the fracture strengths corresp...

On the base of many experimental results, e.g. [18], [19], [21], [12], the object of our analysis is a rate-dependent model for the propagation of a crack in brittle materials. Our goal is a mathematical study of the evolution equation in the geometries of the ’Single Edge Notch Tension’ (SENT) and of the ’Compact Tension’ (ASTM-CT). Besides existence and uniqueness, emphasis is placed on the r...

We derive a cohesive fracture model by homogenizing a periodic composite material whose microstructure is characterized by the presence of brittle inclusions in a reticulated unbreakable elastic structure.