This book consists of a collection of lectures prepared for a short course on "Fracture Mechanics Methodology" sponsored by the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD), part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The course was organized jointly by Professor George C. Sih of the Institute of Fracture and Solid Mechanics at Lehigh University in the United States and Professor Luciano Faria from Centro de Mecanica e de Materiais das Universidade de Lisboa in Portugal. It was held in Lisbon from June 1 to 4, 1981. Dr. Robert Badaliance from the McDonnell Aircraft...

Concrete has traditionally been known as a material used widely in the construction of roads, bridges and buildings. Since cost effectiveness has always been one of the more important aspects of design, concrete, when reinforced and/or prestressed, is finding more use in other areas of application such as floating marine structures, storage tanks, nuclear vessel containments and a host of other structures. Because of the demand for concrete to operate under different loading and environmen tal conditions, increasing attention has been paid to study concrete specimens and structure behavior. A...

Composites offer great promise as light weight and strong materials for high performance structures. One of the major advantages of these materials as compared with metals is the basic way in which heterogeneity resist crack extension. In a fiber/matrix composite system, the fibers tend to cause cracks to form at closer spacing and delay the formation of a large crack. The enhancement of local failure such as fiber breaking, matrix cracking and interface debonding further reduces the energy level which might have otherwise reached the point of catastrophic failure. Even though substantial...

Experiments on fracture of materials are made for various purposes. Of primary importance are those through which criteria predicting material failure by deformation and/or fracture are investigated. Since the demands of engineering application always precede the development of theories, there is another kind of experiment where conditions under which a particular material can fail are simulated as closely as possible to the operational situation but in a simplified and standardized form. In this way, many of the parameters corresponding to fracture such as toughness, Charpy values, crack...

An International Conference on the Application of Fracture Mechanics to Ma terials and Structures was held at the Hotel Kolpinghaus in Freiburg, West Ger many, June 20-24, 1983. It was attended by more than 250 participants from different countries which include Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Democratic Republic of Germany, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, People's Republic of China, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America, USSR and Yugoslavia. Conference Co-Chairmen were...

Material technology has become so diversified in theories and the construction of novel microstructures that the researchers and practitioners are drifting further apart. This book is based on material presented at an International Symposium in Xanthi, Greece in July 1989. The symposium attracted a group of individual engineers and scientists from the East and West who tackled the question of why particular manipulations of a given material have particular effects. Emphasis is laid on the strain energy function because of the versatile role it plays in mechanics and physics. It has...

The current situation with regard to the use of high-performance composites is one of seeking a reliable means of characterizing the fundamental properties and/or behavior of composite materials. The employment of such materials in vi tal structural applications require criteria as part of the materials selection and design procedures. However, the principal limitation of the many currently available procedures, most of which were borrowed from the metal i"ndustry, is its intrinsic restriction to single phase materials. They cannot adequately ac count for the variations in the constituents or...