Any opinions expressed in this memoir are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Academy of Sciences. University of Rome on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard. He began his teaching career in 1912 as assistant professor of mathematics at the newly established Rice Institute , now Rice University, in Houston, Texas. He became professor there in 1...

This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to dat...

The time dependence of fracture has two sources: (1) the viscoelasticity of material behavior in the bulk of the structure, and (2) the rate process of the breakage of bonds in the fracture process zone which causes the softening law for the crack opening to be rate-dependent. The objective of this study is to clarify the differences between these two influences and their role in the size effec...

In this paper, meshless methods and partition of unity based finite element methods are reviewed. In meshless methods, the approximation is built without the explicit connectivity information between the nodes; moving-least squares approximants and natural neighbor-based interpolants are discussed. The enrichment of the finite element approximation through the partition of unity framework is de...

Recent developments in fracture dynamics include the discovery of elastic waves which propagate along moving crack fronts in three-dimensional solids, and the identification of possible sources of the roughening and low terminal speeds of tensile cracks in brittle amorphous solids. Those topics are discussed briefly here.

This paper considers a 2-D fracture analysis of anisotropic piezoelectric solids by a boundary elementfree method. A traction boundary integral equation (BIE) that only involves the singular terms of order 1/r is first derived using integration by parts. New variables, namely, the tangential derivative of the extended displacement (the extended displacement density) for the general boundary and...