This project will support the Summer School on Fracture to be held in Cargese, France, June 7-19, 2010. The objectives of the Summer School are: (i) to bring together a multidisciplinary group of internationally renowned researchers - physicists, statistical physicists, materials scientists, and engineers - to discuss current research and future trends, and to interact with each other; (ii) to accomplish this in the setting of a Summer School for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows so that young researchers can be brought into the field. The setting of the Summer School is particularly useful because the lectures are to be presented in a classroom format, with detailed descriptions. This format also enables good interactions and potential collaborations between the different groups of researchers. Two sessions of panel discussions are planned in order to summarize the presentations and to evaluate potential areas of research.
The Summer School will provide an educational opportunity for about 30 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows from around the world who will be exposed to advanced topics in fracture, and current and future research trends from world experts. A multi-disciplinary approach is also cultivated by bringing together physicists, materials scientists and engineers. The predominant broader impact is the education and training of the next generation of researchers in the area of fracture. The Summer School also has a global reach, in the sense of bringing together both lecturers and students from different countries.
Summer School on Fracture Fracture research is at an important stage: linear elastic fracture mechanics is now well established in engineering practice; however, research into nonlinear problems of fracture continues to be important and the field is still undergoing vigorous development. While early investigations were dominated by engineers who successfully provided the underpinnings of a damage tolerant approach to structural design, in the past two decades, a large number of physicists have entered the field developing physical models for fracture from the atomic scale up. There are numerous conferences annually where fracture research is presented and discussed amongst experts in the discipline. The objective of the Summer School is different – it is to engage the next generation of researchers in the conversation! Participants as well as lecturers from different disciplines – physics, mechanics, materials science – gathered to assess progress in multidisciplinary, multiscale approaches to fracture. This Summer School focuses on current trends in fracture serves as an impetus to the formulation of the next steps in fracture research, combining tools of statistical physics, materials science and mechanics. With the aim of promoting multidisciplinary interactions between different groups of fracture researchers, Dr. Elisabeth Bouchaud, CEA Saclay and Prof. Krishnaswamy Ravi-Chandar, University of Texas at Austin, organized a Summer School on Fracture held at the Institut d’Etudes Scientifiques de Cargese, in Cargese, Corsica from June 7 to June 18, 2010. The aims of the Summer School on Fracture are two-fold: (i) to bring together a multidisciplinary group of researchers – physicists, especially statistical physicists, materials scientists, and engineers –to describe the state-of-the-art of current research, to discuss future trends, and to interact with each other over an extended period of time. (ii) to develop the next generation of researchers in the field by providing them with an opportunity to learn from and interact with the leaders in the field in a stimulating setting. Since fracture research covers a fairly broad range of topics, we elected to focus on a few major themes for the Summer School: (i) statistical physics of fracture, applied to glasses, disordered media, and heterogeneous media in general; (ii) modeling and experimentation of subcritical crack growth resulting from creep, environmental attack and other causes, (iii) ductile failure approached both from the perspective of materials science as well as continuum mechanics, and (iv) numerical simulations spanning atomistic to continuum scales. Speakers were selected by the Organizers in consultation with the International Advisory Board in order to represent a broad range of perspectives – analytical, experimental and numerical. The setting of a Summer School was particularly useful because the lectures were presented in a classroom format, with detailed descriptions; each lecturer had three hours to present their perspective. This format also enabled good interactions between the different groups of researchers. The Summer School was organized in a two-week format, that allowed ample time for one-on-one or small group discussions. Two sessions of panel discussions were held in order to summarize the presentations and to evaluate potential areas of research. The student participants were required to present their current work during two poster sessions. The Summer School provided an intellectually stimulating environment for capturing the current state-of-the-art in multidisciplinary fracture research and contributed to the intellectual development of young researchers entering the field.
