Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Peridynamic Models For Fatigue And Fracture In Isotropic And In Polycrystalline Materials, Guanfeng Zhang

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

To improve design and reliability, extensive efforts has been devoted to understanding damage and failure of materials and structures using numerical simulation, as a complement of theory and experiment. In this thesis, peridynamics is adopted to study fatigue and dynamic failure problems.

Fatigue is a major failure mode in engineering structures. Predicting fracture/failure under cyclic loading is a challenging problem. Classical model cannot directly be applied to problems with discontinuities. A peridynamic model is adopted in this work because of important advantages of peridynamics in allowing autonomous crack initiation and propagation. A recently proposed peridynamic fatigue crack model is considered …

Studies On Woven Carbon/Vinyl Ester Composites: Environmental Effects, Joining And Hybridization, Ricardo Garcia

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The incessant demand for fiber reinforced polymer composites, or FRPCs, in industrial applications which desire materials that possess high strength-to-weight ratios, generates a theory-to-practice void which must be filled with scientific research. In this Thesis, woven carbon/vinyl ester composites are studied under a wide spectrum of settings and conditions. The adverse effects of sea water environment and arctic temperatures on such mentioned composites are explored in the form of moisture uptake, impact on flexural modulus, strength and structural damage. It was found that sea water saturation in general degrades the flexural strength up to 19.45%, and arctic exposure and combined …