Fracture toughness resistance curves describe a material's resistance against crack propagation. These curves are often used to characterize biomaterials like bone, nacre or dentin as these materials commonly exhibit a pronounced increase in fracture toughness with crack extension due to co-acting mechanisms such as crack bridging, crack deflection and microcracking. The knowledge of appropriat...

Based on the kinematic approach of limit analysis, a full set of upper bound solutions for the stability of homogeneous rock slopes subjected to tension cracks are obtained. The generalized Hoek-Brown failure criterion is employed to describe the non-linear strength envelope of rocks. In this paper, critical failure mechanisms are determined for cracks of known depth but unspecified location, c...

015504-1 The shear wave speed is an upper limit for the speed of cracks loaded in tension in linear elastic solids. We have discovered that in a nonlinear material, cracks in tension (mode I) exceed this sound speed and travel in an intersonic range between shear and longitudinal wave speeds. The experiments are conducted in highly stretched sheets of rubber; intersonic cracks can be produced s...

This paper presents a method for predicting initial trajectories of propagation of two separate fatigue cracks, which are developed under two perpendicular cyclic loads with phase difference between them. Calculation of trajectories of these two initial cracks is the first step in prediction of trajectories and rate of propagation of long cracks. This problem is important for analysis of durabi...

The origin of fracture in epithelial cell sheets subject to stretch is commonly attributed to excess tension in the cells' cytoskeleton, in the plasma membrane, or in cell-cell contacts. Here, we demonstrate that for a variety of synthetic and physiological hydrogel substrates the formation of epithelial cracks is caused by tissue stretching independently of epithelial tension. We show that the...

The propagation of cracks in three dimensions is analyzed by a meshless method. The cracks are modeled by a set of triangles that are added when the propagation occurs. Since the method is meshless, no remeshing of the domain is necessary during the propagation. To avoid using a large number of degrees of freedom, the stress singularity along the front of the cracks is taken into account by an ...

The aim of the study was to find the optimum combination of materials and thicknesses to provide a tough, damage resistant multi-layer system with numerical methods to restore the damaged teeth. Extended Finite Element Method (XFEM) was used to assess the critical loads for the onset of damage modes such as radial cracks and plastic deformation in dental prostheses, which consist of a brittle o...

A ®nite element model for investigating damage evolution in brittle matrix composites was developed. This modeling is based on an axisymmetric unit cell composed of a ®ber and its surrounding matrix. The unit cell was discretized into linearly elastic elements for the ®ber and the matrix and cohesive elements which allow cracking in the matrix, ®ber-matrix interface, and ®ber. The cohesive elem...

The present paper deals with the mixed mode fracture analysis of a weakened orthotropic half-plane with multiple cracks propagation. The orthotropic half-plane contains Volterra type glide and climb edge dislocations. It is assumed that the medium is under in-plane loading conditions. The distributed dislocation technique is used to obtain integral equations for the dynamic problem of multiple ...