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Do you see cracks everyday?
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Lots of things crack, some just a little, and some a whole lot. You probably
see cracks everyday, in the sidewalk, in a building like this one, in a window, or maybe in a bone. |
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If you ever broke a bone, they may have called the break a fracture.
Fracture is another word for cracking or a crack. |
broken arm courtesy of the Scharles |
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Fracture mechanics is the study of how cracks
start, grow, and (hopefully) stop. It is important to study how cracks
behave because cracks can cause things to fail, something as small as a bone
or as large as a ship. If a large structure, such as a building or a ship,
cracks, this may lead to a
catastrophic (*) failure
which could affect many people. |
| To aid in the study of fracture mechanics, people have developed
computer programs which allow them to simulate how cracks might grow in
different structures, such as the body of an airplane or in a concrete dam.
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This is a computer model of the
fuselage (*) of an airplane.
The red line is a crack.
Watch the crack
grow under pressure.
animation courtesy of David Chen
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What kind of materials crack?
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