This book exposes a number of mathematical models for fracture of growing difficulty. All models are treated in a unified way, based on incremental energy minimization. They differ from each other by the assumptions made on the inelastic part of the total energy, here called the "cohesive energy". Each model describes a specific aspect of material response, and particular care is devoted to underline the correspondence of each model to the experiments. The content of the book is a re-elaboration of the lectures delivered at the First Sperlonga Summer School on Mechanics and Engineering Sciences in September 2011. In the year and a half elapsed after the course, the material has been revised and enriched with new and partially unpublished results. Significant additions have been introduced in the occasion of the course "The variational approach to fracture and other inelastic phenomena", delivered at SISSA, Trieste, in March 2013. The Notes reflect a research line carried on by the writer over the years, addressed to a comprehensive description of the many aspects of the phenomenon of fracture, and to its relations with other phenomena, such as the formation of microstructure and the changes in the material’s strength induced by plasticity and damage. Reprinted from the Journal of Elasticity, volume 112, issue 1, 2013.

Gabrio Piola works had an enormous impact on the development of applied mathematics and continuum mechanics. An excellent scientific committee who took it upon themselves to translate his complete works. In a second step, they commented Piola’s work and compared it to modern theories in mechanics in order to stress Piola’s impact on modern science and proofs that he has set milestones in applied mathematics. This book presents Piola's original Italian text together with ist translations and their comments. It shows impressively that Gabrio Piola’s work must still be regarded as a modern theory.

The book retraces the history of the Italian Association of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (AIMETA) since its establishment in 1965. AIMETA is the official Italian association of mechanics adhering to IUTAM (International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics), which organizes and coordinates a meaningful number of research activities, the most important of which are the biennial National Congress and the internationally renowned journal “Meccanica”, published by Springer. Besides collecting and organizing all related important data and information, as far as possible, by distinguishing among the five scientific areas – general mechanics, solids, structures, fluids, machines – encompassed by AIMETA, the history of the association is assumed as a proper perspective to overview the evolution of theoretical and applied mechanics in Italy over about the last fifty years. This is accomplished in the first part of the book. with also a specific focus on the mechanics of solids and structures, where the biographies of a meaningful number of recognized Italian scholars of mechanics in all areas are also provided, along with testimonials and memories by a few senior people meaningfully involved with AIMETA and Italian mechanics. The second part gives an account, although unavoidably incomplete, of recent developments of mechanical sciences in Italy, as reflected also in the activities of AIMETA and with reference to the international context. Contributions by a number of invited senior scholars, still very active, consist of overviews on some scientific themes in the various areas, summaries of achievements of research groups, expressions of research viewpoints, prospects for future developments.

This book presents papers surrounding the extensive discussions that took place from the ‘Variational Analysis and Aerospace Engineering’ workshop held at the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture in 2015. Contributions to this volume focus on advanced mathematical methods in aerospace engineering and industrial engineering such as computational fluid dynamics methods, optimization methods in aerodynamics, optimum controls, dynamic systems, the theory of structures, space missions, flight mechanics, control theory, algebraic geometry for CAD applications, and variational methods and applications. Advanced graduate students, researchers, and professionals in mathematics and engineering will find this volume useful as it illustrates current collaborative research projects in applied mathematics and aerospace engineering.

Presenting original results from both theoretical and numerical viewpoints, this text offers a detailed discussion of the variational approach to brittle fracture. This approach views crack growth as the result of a competition between bulk and surface energy, treating crack evolution from its initiation all the way to the failure of a sample. The authors model crack initiation, crack path, and crack extension for arbitrary geometries and loads.

This book gathers outstanding papers on numerical modeling in Mechanical Engineering (Volume 2) as part of the 2-volume proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Numerical Modeling in Engineering (NME 2021), which was held in Ghent, Belgium, on August 23–24, 2022. The overall objective of the conference was to bring together international scientists and engineers in academia and industry from fields related to advanced numerical techniques, such as the finite element method (FEM), boundary element method (BEM), isogeometric analysis (IGA), and their applications to a wide range of engineering disciplines. This book addresses numerical simulations of various mechanical and materials engineering industrial applications such as aerospace applications, acoustic analysis, bio-mechanical applications, contact problems and wear, heat transfer analysis, vibration and dynamics, transient analysis, nonlinear analysis, composite materials, polymers, metal alloys, fracture mechanics, fatigue of materials, creep, mechanical behavior, micro-structure, phase transformation, and crystal plasticity. The book is intended for academics, including graduate students and researchers, as well as industrial practitioners working in the numerical modeling in mechanical engineering topics.

Advances in Applied Mechanics, Volume 53 in this ongoing series, highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters on Phase field modelling of fracture, Advanced geometry representations and tools for microstructural and multiscale modelling, The material point method: the past and the future, From Experimental Modeling of Shotcrete to Large Scale Numerical Simulations of Tunneling, and Material point method after 25 years: theory, implementation, applications. - Provides the authority and expertise of leading contributors from an international board of authors - Presents the latest release in the Advances in Applied Mechanics series