Fractal Patterns in Plasticity, Fracture, and Damage Phenomena

Martin Ostoja Starzewski, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

An accurate assessment of the damage state of a given load-bearing material or structure is critical to make a decision: safe or repair/replace. While volumes of research on fracture mechanics, fatigue, and reliability have been carried out over the past one hundred years, this project aims to explore the potential to more accurately assess the stress and damage state from the fractal dimension of a material’s crack pattern. To this end, spatial material disorder/randomness is introduced into realistic large-scale models of elastic-plastic-brittle materials to study the growth of multiscale systems of interacting cracks in 2D and 3D models.