Mechanical damage to axons is a proximal cause of deficits following traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury. Axons are injured predominantly by tensile strain, and identifying the strain experienced by axons is a critical step towards injury prevention. White matter demonstrates complex non-linear mechanical behavior at the continuum level that evolves from even more complex, dynamic, co...

Article history: Received 2 May 2015 Received in revised form 10 October 2015 Accepted 27 November 2015 Available online 28 November 2015 Load-bearing laminated structures undergo complex crack evolution processes and consequent stiffness degradation, which leads to a decline in their overall performance. Thus, consideration of damage evolution is important for stiffness critical applications. ...

The fracture behavior of particulate composite materials when subjected to dynamic loading has been a great concern for many industrial applications as these materials are particularly susceptible to impact loading conditions. As a result, many numerical and experimental techniques have been developed to deal with this class of problems. In this work, the fracture behavior of particulate compos...

We analyze the damage initiation, damage progression, and failure during 3-dimensional (3-D) elastoplastic deformations of a fiber reinforced polymeric laminated composite impacted by a low speed rigid sphere, and compare computed results with experimental findings available in the literature. Damage is assumed to initiate when one of Hashin’s failure criteria is satisfied, and its evolution is...

Porous brittle solids evidence complex mechanical behavior, where localized failure patterns originate from processes on the microstructural level. In order to investigate mechanics of porous solids, we outline a general stochastic and numerical microstructure-based approach. To this end, generate random microstructures by level-cutting Gaussian fields, conduct simulations using material point ...

One of the most relevant properties of composite materials to be considered is stiffness. Fiberglass has been used traditionally as a fibrous reinforcing element when stiff materials are required. However, natural fibers are been exploited as replacements for synthetic fibers to satisfy environmental concerns. Among the different natural fibers, wood fibers show the combination of relatively hi...