Plants have numerous active protection strategies for adapting to complex and severe environments. These strategies provide endless inspiration for extending the service life of materials and machines. Tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla), a tree that thrives in raging sandstorm regions, has adapted to blustery conditions by evolving extremely effective and robust erosion resistant characteristics. Howev...

The fundamental topic in this document is the development of cracks in steel. For structures subjected to cyclic loads, such cracks can develop over time and ultimately reach the size at which some dramatic failure occur. While this problem is rare in structures made of “mild steel,” the use of “high tensile” steel changes that situation. It is straightforward to double the strength of mild ste...

In the present work we present a systematic experimental investigation of the generation and subsequent evolution of dynamic failure modes in sandwich structures subjected to low-speed impact. Model sandwich specimens involving a compliant polymer core sandwiched between two metal layers were designed and subjected to impact loading to simulate failure evolution mechanisms in real sandwich stru...

Automatically identifying cracks in glass is an application of machine vision that has not been studied much before. It poses the unique opportunity to incorporate the physics of glass and how it cracks into a detection algorithm. ColorCrack is an automated method of finding cracks in glass smartphone screens using insights from previous work in object and edge detection.The key to ColorCrack i...

In this paper we develop a method for the restoration of cracks on a painting. First, we detect the local minima (they can be either cracks or painting brush strokes), by using a morphological highpass operator, called top-hat transformation. The crack filling procedure must be applied only on the cracks and not on these dark brush strokes, which are also detected. In order to separate these br...

Ferroelectric perovskites are widely used in transducer, memory and optical applications due to their attractive electromechanical and optical properties. In these brittle materials, reliability and failure of devices is dominated by the behavior of cracks. The electromechanical coupling causes cracks to interact strongly with both mechanical as well as electrical fields. Additionally, cracks a...

This chapter reviews the recent progress toward computer simulation of the growth of vast systems of branched hydraulic cracks needed for the efficient extraction of gas or oil from shale strata. It is emphasized that, to achieve significant gas extraction, the spacing of parallel hydraulic cracks must be on the order of 0.1m, which means that the fracturing of the entire fracking stage would r...

In this paper, a Paris law-based model is presented whereby crack propagation occurs under cyclic loading in air (fatigue) and in an aggressive environment (corrosion-fatigue) for the case of corner cracks (with a wide range of aspect ratios in the matter of the initial cracks) in finite-thickness plates of 316L austenitic stainless steel subjected to tension, bending, or combined (tension + be...

The Yazd-Ardakan basin in Central Iran has two separated aquifers. The shallow unconfined aquifer is supplies 40 Qanats. The deep saturated confined aquifer is the main water storage. Due to over-withdrawal, water table has been decreasing during last 25 years. Recent study shows that the shortage of the aquifer is about 16 meters and land subsidence is 0.5 1.2 meters. Long deep cracks are foun...

The phase field method is a very powerful numerical method to solve moving boundary problems. Here we demonstrate how it can be applied to various processes involving sound propagation and fracture. This approach is related to a new theory of fracture which describes in particular the fast growth of cracks. We study the propagation of elastic waves, the determination of stress intensity factors...