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Crack Propagation in Societal Structures

Motivation

Societal structures are those whose performance - including catastrophic failure - has a large impact on a significant population. The study of crack propagation in such structures, through fully interactive simulation, offers many pedagogical prizes. Among these are:

contextualization of educational content: simulation of damage assessment and failure analysis of aging aircraft and concrete dams can implant topics such as statics, strength of materials, and calculus into current, highly visual, and dramatic scenarios.
socio-economic relevance: all decisions resulting from the output of a simulation on such structures must be constrained by cost and societal impact.
synthesis of currently "departmentalized" disciplines: a complete simulation unites material science, structural mechanics, numerical methods, and computer visualization.

Existing Research Simulations

The Cornell Fracture Group has created interactive simulators, based on finite and boundary element numerical methods, for crack growth in such structures. The FRANC2D and FRANC3D simulators are self-complete. They are constructed on topological databases, have integral automatic remeshing, on-board analysis engines, and a complete spectrum of visualization tools. Executables and sample models are available through anonymous ftp.

Educational versions of FRANC2D originated from Project SOCRATES (Study of Complementary Research and Teaching in Engineering Science), funded by the US Department of Education (Ingraffea and Mink, 1988). They have been distributed to over 50 universities worldwide.

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This page is maintained by Simeon Warner
Last updated 3 June 1996, links corrected 18 June 1998.