Dynamic Failure in Nominally Brittle Materials

Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar
Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, TX

Sponsored by the Dept. of Engineering Mechanics

Date:  Friday, April 14, 2000
Time:  3:30 p.m.
Place:  W196 Nebraska Hall


Dynamic failure in solids has attracted much attention over most of this century from physicists as well as engineers, due both to its technological interest and inherent scientific curiosity. Processes that control fracture appear at different scales; the continuum mechanics formulation addresses the larger length scales and has been the focus of much of the engineering approach to fracture modeling.

More recently, with the advent of massively parallel computational schemes, modeling of the fracture processes at the smallest length scales has been attempted. Modeling at the intermediate scales requires ad hoc assumptions regarding microscale fracture processes and is far less advanced. This scale, however, is the bridge between the atomistic models and the continuum models. In this lecture, I will present a micromechanical picture of dynamic failure. Using nominally brittle polymers as vehicles, dynamic failure under normal and shear dominated conditions will be examined.