Intended for engineers from a variety of disciplines dealing with
structural materials, this text describes the current state of
knowledge. It begins by describing the fracture process at the two
extremes of scale: first in the context of atomic structures, then in
terms of a continuous elastic medium. Treating the fracture process in
increasingly sophisticated ways, the book then considers plastic
corrections and the procedures for measuring the toughness of materials.
Practical considerations are then discussed, including crack
propagation, geometry dependence, flaw density, mechanisms of failure by
cleavage, the ductile-brittle transition, and continuum damage
mechanics. The whole is rounded off with discussions of generalised
plasticity and the link between the microscopic and macroscopic aspects,
and problems are provided at the end of each chapter.