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How do cracks grow?
Something must be making the crack grow -- some force. In the case of dams,
that force could be the force of the water, a temperature variation in the
concrete, a chemical reaction in the concrete, or movement of the dam's foundation.
A material's resistence to cracking is called its stress intensity factor, or KIc.
Cracking your model in a simulation
| A computer simulation of crack growth can figure
out how the crack will grow, but not how or where
it will start. So you have to tell the program where the crack starts and
then it can do the rest.
Here is an image of a model with an initial cracks on both the left hand edge
and the right hand edge (cracks are green lines). The program which will
analyzed this model can only handle cracks which start from the outside of the
structure.
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What does a fracture simulation return? |
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