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...

In this article, after a brief description of some signi®cant catastrophic structural failures going back to the period when iron and steel began to replace wood and masonry as the primary structural materials, the historical development of the ®eld of fracture mechanics is discussed. First, the basic concepts of the ®eld, the motivation underlying their development and the key contributions ma...

in the present research, implementations of different computational geometry technologies in isogeometric analysis framework for computational fracture mechanics are investigated. nurbs and t-splines are two different computational geometry technologies which are studied in this work. among features of b-spline basis functions the possibility of enhancing a b-spline basis with discontinuities b...

X-ray diffraction observation of metal fracture provides fracture analysis with useful information on the mechanics and mechanical conditions of fracturing. This method is called “X-ray Fractography” and has been developed especially in Japan as a new engineering tool for fracture analysis[1-3]. X-ray fractographic technique was applied to fracture surface of dental material. The relationship b...

initial cracks occur in high strength concrete sleepers for various reasons, such as shrinkage and wrong curing and long lifetime of over 50 years of sleepers. these cracks may lead to complete failure of the structure. in order to more accurately design the sleepers, fracture mechanics (not strength of materials) should be incorporated. in order to achieve this purpose, it is important to fore...