FRACTURE AND BENDING MECHANICS

The book prepared by Robert Khan and Erich Cavazos is dedicated to the fracture mechanics - this is the field of mechanics that is mainly concerned with the cracks propagation within materials. Fracture mechanics uses various established and proven methods of the analytical mechanics of solids in order to perform calculations of the driving forces on the cracks and the methods of experimental mechanics of solids to characterize the resistance of the materials to fracturing. In contemporary materials science, the fracture mechanics is considered one of the most important instruments in improving mechanical performance of the materials and components of mechanical systems.

Fracture mechanics is applying the physics of stress and strain, especially theories of plasticity/elasticity, to the micro-crystallographic details revealed in the real materials for prediction of the macroscopic mechanical failures. It widely uses the fractography for better understanding and explanation of the causes of failures and to verify the theoretically predicted mechanical failures with real-life failures. The book consists of thirteen chapters, addressing the fracture mechanisms and toughness, fatigue and fractography, peridynamics and bending, stress, mechanics of the structural fracture, and other aspects.