Long-term Strength of Materials: Reliability Assessment and Lifetime Prediction of Engineering Structures

The physics of fracture processes, which includes Fracture mechanics, is crucial for understanding the longevity and reliability of any structure, from fracture initiation to propagation and final catastrophic failure. This textbook introduces the thermodynamics of irreversible processes along with entropy to address the time dependency of fracture.

Working from observations of structural failure, the book identifies the principal failure types such as brittle fracture, with considerations of solo crack initiation and crack propagation associated with collective distributed damage. The other type is ductile fracture, when a crack blunts immediately on the application of stress resulting in large deformation. The book then addresses the life of a structure in a specific environment and load condition, using irreversible thermodynamics and the entropy criterion to address cooperative fracture and novel statistical Fracture mechanics to address solo fracture.

• Applies well-established concepts from mechanics, absent in contemporary Fracture mechanics
• Uses novel concepts of mechanics, irreversible thermodynamics, and statistical Fracture mechanics

The book is ideal for graduate students and design engineers in civil and materials engineering, as well as mechanical and chemical engineering. Students using the book need no more than basic college-level mechanics, mathematics, and statistics knowledge.

Alexander Chudnovsky is UIC Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Director of the Fracture Mechanics and Materials Durability Laboratory in the Civil and Materials Engineering Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA. Over a career of more than 60 years, he has received numerous teaching awards and the 2004 Outstanding Achievement Award of the Society of Plastics Engineers.

Kalyan Sehanobish has been a global plastic product consultant and owner of Materials & Adhesives Research Services since 2019, and for over 25 years was Research Fellow at the Dow Chemical Company prior to 2019. He received the R&D inventor of the year award for several projects as a technical project team participant and the Automative PACE award for IMPAXX foam in 2008.