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...

Analysis has been performed on fracture initiation near a crack in a brittle material with strength described by Weibull statistics. This nonlocal fracture model allows for a direct correlation between near crack-tip stresses and failure. Predictions are made for both the toughness and average fracture initiation angle of a crack under mixed-mode loading. This is pertinent for composites and is...

Micromechanical models for fracture initiation that incorporate local failure criteria have been widely developed for metallic and ceramic materials; however, few such micromechanical models have been developed for the fracture of bone. In fact, although the fracture event in "hard" mineralized tissues such as bone is commonly believed to be locally strain-controlled, only recently has there be...

generaly pressure vessels should withstand internal and external pressures in the form of static or periodic stresses. if the application of such a vessel requires the lowest possible weight, the fracture mechanics approach may be considened in design procedure in order to obtain the minimum wall thickness. in this work the thickness of the vessel wall was determined using k values and smallest...

OBJECTIVE This article assesses the position-dependent injury tolerance of the hip in the frontal direction based on testing of eight postmortem human subjects. METHODS For each subject, the left and right hemipelvis complex was axially loaded using a previously developed test configuration. Six positions were defined from a seated femur neutral condition, combining flexed, neutral, and exten...

A mechanistic understanding of fracture in human bone is critical to predicting fracture risk associated with age and disease. Despite extensive work, a mechanistic framework for describing how the microstructure affects the failure of bone is lacking. Although micromechanical models incorporating local failure criteria have been developed for metallic and ceramic materials, few such models exi...

Osteoporosis is a bone disease related to age, it weakens bone structure by deterioration of the trabecular architecture and decreases the cortical envelop width and increases its porosity. Hip fractures are the more recurrent consequences of osteoporosis, and are the cause of morbidity and increase the rate of mortality. The fracture risk due to osteoporosis, is undertaken with Dual-Energy X-r...

The presence of skull fracture has been associated with a higher risk of intracranial sequelae than if a fracture were not present. This is true for the total population of head-injury patients. However, reanalysis of the patient selection criteria data from two large published series on skull imaging in head trauma revealed that this increased risk factor for intracranial sequelae did not appl...