This paper is devoted to the comparison of the evolution of damage governed by a gradient damage model with the evolution of a crack predicted by Griffith’s law. The analysis is made in a two-dimensional setting, assuming that damage is concentrated inside thin bands whose width is proportional to the internal length of the material. Taking advantage of the variational formulation based on the ...

Introduction: Today, the spread of the use of ionizing radiation and its vital role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases has been identified. Therefore, protecting pregnant women from ionizing radiation is essential and is considered as the standard criterion for Medical Radiation center. The aim of this study was to investigate the observance of protective principles and...

A multiscale fatigue analysis model is developed for brittle composite materials. The mathematical homogenization theory is generalized to account for multiscale damage effects in heterogeneous media and a closed form expression relating nonlocal microphase fields to the overall strains and damage is derived. The evolution of fatigue damage is approximated by the first order initial value probl...

Two professors, one of law and the other of pharmacology, trace the development of English law on compensation for injuries caused by defective drugs and examine the Vaccine Damage Payments Act of 1980, which established a no-fault system of compensation for vaccine injuries for a limited number of diseases. They discuss two possible approaches to handling compensation for drug-induced injuries...

Car owners are liable for property damage inflicted on other motorists. In most countries such liability must be insured by law. That law may favor expensive or heavy vehicles, prone to suffer or inflict large losses. This paper explores links between liability rules and vehicle choice. It presumes cooperative insurance, but non-cooperative acquisition of vehicles. Thus, the Nash equilibrium an...

Inspections play an essential role in the damage tolerance approach to control fatigue damage. In this paper a method is presented to optimize the cost-effectiveness of inspection scheduling for single and multiple inspections during the expected lifetime. Detailed results are given for a surface-breaking crack of depth a in a cyclic tension field. The original crack depth is treated as a rando...

We present a theoretical study of the fatigue fracture of heterogeneous materials. A generic fiber bundle model is proposed, which provides a direct connection between the microscopic fracture mechanisms and the macroscopic time evolution of fatigue. In the model, material elements fail either due to immediate breaking or undergo a damage accumulating ageing process. On the macro-level the mode...