Ahmed Elbanna, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign

Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar, University of Texas at Austin

Fracture is a fascinating, nonlinear and often dynamic, phenomenon occurring on many scales. In many systems, small-scale perturbations may lead to large scale system fragilities and catastrophic fractures. Understanding the underpinnings of material response at the microscale, including origins of friction and adhesion, and their implications for fracture at macro scale is thus of vital importance to many engineering, biological, and geophysical applications. This minisymposium solicits contributions in all fields related to multiscale physics, computational modeling and experimental investigations relevant to fracture and fragmentation processes in quasi-brittle solids. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: (a) constitutive modeling appropriate for modeling friction and adhesion at the microscale, (b) thermodynamics based models for bulk damage and its rate dependence, (c) theoretical analysis of crack nucleation and initiation, (e ) experimental observation of crack nucleation and propagation at different length scales (investigations on dynamic fracture is particularly welcome), and (d) computational modeling of fracture.

Keywords: material systems, solids and structure