IUTAM Symposium on Nonlinear Analysis of Fracture

The Symposium remained focussed on issues of practical significance for fracture phenomena, with concentration on aspects that are still imperfectly understood. The most significant unifying issue in this regard is that of scale this theme was addressed from several perspectives. One important aspect is the problem of passing information on one scale up or down, as an input for analysis at another scale. Although this is not always the case, it may be that the microscopic process of fracture is understood in some particular class of materials. The problem then becomes one of constructing an appropriate model at the macroscopic scale, that retains the essential features of the microscopic process but avoids unmanageable complexity. Dually, considering the problem from the macroscopic end, it is important to assess which particular aspects of the macroscopic stress field interact directly with the fracture process. In the simplest cases, the process is driven by the crack tip singularity in the macroscopic field then, at least some problems relating to scale disappear. The focus of interest of course is in the regime where this singularity dominance is not realised.