The ongoing process of bio-evolution has produced materials which are perfectly adapted to fulfil a specific functional role. The natural world provides us with a multitude of examples of materials with durability, strength, mechanisms of programmed self-assembly and biodegradability.

The materials industry has sought to observe and appreciate the relationship between structure, properties and function of these biological materials. A multidisciplinary approach, building on recent advances at the forefront of physics, chemistry and molecular biology, has been successful in producing...

The idea for this book came out of the EURESCO Conference on High Performance Fibers: Euroconference on Fiber Fracture in 2000. Many of the books that are currently available look at different aspects of fiber processing, properties, or applications, but none are focussed on the fracture behaviour of fibers. This book presents the mechancisms and models of fiber fracture currently available for both natural and synthetic fibers, and it is expected that increasingly there will be cross fertilization between the fields, opening new frontiers in academic research and more competitive products...

This book contains 15 fully peer-reviewed Invited Papers which were presented at the 13^th Biennial European Conference on Fracture and is a companion to the CD-ROM http: //www.elsevier.com/locate/isbn/008043701xProceedings.
The organisers of the ECF 13 opted from the very beginning for an application-orientated conference, and consequently, this book contributes to the understanding of fracture phenomena, and disseminates fracture concepts and their application to the solution of engineering problems to practitioners in a wide range of fields.
The fields covered in this...