This paper presents numerical analysis of stress intensity factors (SIFs) of inclined cracks due to mechanical mismatches. According to literature survey, tremendous amounts of SIFs can be found elsewhere. However, the SIFs for inclined cracks are difficult to obtain especially when mechanical mismatch at the crack interface are considered. ANSYS finite element program is used to model the crac...

This paper studies the initiation of cohesive cracks in the thermal shock problem through a variational analysis. A two-dimensional semi-infinite slab with an imposed temperature drop on its free surface is considered. Assuming that cracks are periodically distributed and orthogonal to the surface, at short times we show that the optimum is a distribution of infinitely close cohesive cracks. Th...

A new technique using contrast enhanced micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) was developed to improve the ability to detect dentinal cracks in teeth and assess associated risks to oral health. Extracted, whole human molars that exhibited visual evidence of external cracks following extraction and machined, partially fractured elephant dentin specimens were labeled by BaSO(4) precipitation and i...

The effect of preexisting subsurface cracks on the strength of lap splices was investigated. Ten full-scale beams with No. 11 (No. 36) bars and lap splice lengths of 33, 79, and 120 in. (838, 2007, and 3048 mm) were tested. The beams had mitigating features that prevented catastrophic failure upon propagation of the preexisting cracks, such as staggered splices and the presence of some reinforc...

Controlled vertical drying deposition method was used to make high-quality single crystal close-packed colloidal films formed of different radii polystyrene latex spheres on glass substrates coming from a low concentration water suspension (0.1% volume fraction). Regardless of the spheres radii the film thickness was about 6.3 microns. However, cracks destroyed the crystalline film structure du...

Permeability at high temperature is a very important parameter to be considered for designing underground high level nuclear waste repository (HLW) in rock mass. The surrounding rock mass is exposed to heat radiated by HLW when it is buried underground and development or extension of micro-cracks takes place in the host rock due to rise in temperature. Keeping this in view, the permeability stu...

Consider a three-dimensional homogeneous isotropic elastic solid containing a flat pressurized crack, fi. The problem of finding the resulting stress distribution can be reduced to a hypersingular integral equation over Q for the crack-opening displacement. Here, this equation is transformed into a similar equation over a circular region D, using a conformal mapping between Q and D. This new eq...

Mud peeling is a common phenomenon whereby horizontal cracks propagate parallel to the surface of a drying clay. Differential stresses then cause the layer of clay above the crack to curl up to form a mud peel. By treating the clay as a poroelastic solid, we analyse the peeling phenomenon and show that it is caused by the gradient in tensile stress at the surface of the clay, analogously to the...

We present high-resolution compressional wave to shear wave velocity ratios (Vp∕Vs) beneath Kı̄lauea’s summit caldera by applying an in situ estimation method using waveform cross-correlation data for three similar earthquake clusters. We observe high Vp∕Vs ratios (1.832 and 1.852) for two event clusters surrounded by the low background Vp∕Vs value of 1.412 at ∼2.1 km depth below the surface. Th...