Download or read book The Variational Approach to Fracture written by Blaise Bourdin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-19 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.