The Local Approach To Cleavage Fracture

This report assesses the current state of knowledge of the 'local approach' to cleavage fracture, reviews application to ferritic steels and their weldments and addresses limitations and disadvantages of the methodology.

Improving the structural integrity together with the performance (weight, time to failure,...) of structures requires a persisting effort in the field of mechanics of materials and structures. This can be achieved by a better understanding of the relationships between microscopic mechanisms and the macroscopic material behavior and structural response with respect to damage and fracture. This improvement strategy of materials, structures and assement methods can be described as local approach to fracture. The local approach to fracture is an active research field. Initially developped in the context of steel structures (pressure vessels), its application domain has become wider and now deals with various kinds of materials (metallic alloys, metal matrix composites, polymers, elastomers, concrete) as well as various physical deformation and damage mechanisms (plasticity, creep, fatigue, ductile fracture, brittle fracture, ...). This volume contains the proceedings on an international conference dedicated to these issues.

Five laboratories from France, Hungary and the Czech Republic have solved a Project supported fmancially by NATO within the Science for Peace Program (under Nr. 972655) for three years. The project, titled Fracture ResistanceofSteelsfor Containers of Spent Nuclear Fuel, was focused (i) on the generation of data needed for the qualification procedure of a new container introduced by Skoda Nuclear Machinery and (ii) on a number of topics of scientific nature associated with the interesting field of transferability of fracture mechanical data-, It has been found during numerous conference presentations of project results that the knowledge developed within the project would be more attractive when published in a more comprehensive form. This was the reason why the final project workshop was arranged as a meeting of project collaborators and contributing invited experts working in very similar field. The main scope of the final project workshop, titled Transferability of Fracture Mechanical Data and held in Brno from 5 to 6 November 200I, was to bring together project collaborators with a number of invited international experts, both covering the spectrum of topics solved within the project and reviewing the project results in the presence ofthese specialists. A totalof34 colleagues from 7 European countries and the USA participated in the workshop.

This book presents several aspects of the local approach to fracture: damage mechanisms, experimental techniques, damage evolution law and failure criteria, modelling of damage, and numerical simulation -- Back cover.

Recent developments in theoretical physics include new instances of the unification of quite different phenomena. The theoretical community is challenged by the growing interactions between high-energy physics, statistical physics, and condensed matter physics. The common language, though, is exact solutions of two-dimensional and conformable field theories. This volume is a faithful representation of this interdisciplinary domain. Conformable and integrable field theories have been active research topics for several decades. The main recent developments concern the boundary effects and applications to disordered systems. The number of applications of the exact methods to condensed-matter problems has been growing over the years. Nowadays it is widely recognized that strongly interacting systems in low dimensions can be successfully described by integrable and conformable theories. This volume is an indispensable aid to those seeking to find their way in this domain.

This book covers invariant probabilities for a large class of discrete-time homogeneous Markov processes known as Feller processes. These Feller processes appear in the study of iterated function systems with probabilities, convolution operators, and certain time series. From the reviews: "A very useful reference for researchers wishing to enter the area of stationary Markov processes both from a probabilistic and a dynamical point of view." --MONATSHEFTE FÜR MATHEMATIK