Achievement

The collaboration led by Walton (CoPI) and Slattery (Advisor) has made new progress in improving our understanding of crack formation in films. Lauren Ferguson began this work in her last semester of IGERT traineeship support and is continuing as a dissertation project as part of a new AFOSR-supported collaboration to model realistically the stress developed during crack formation. Ferguson has recently devised a method for implementing in a finite code the highly non-standard, curvature dependent boundary conditions associated with the theory of fracture developed by this team. The result has been excellent convergence and agreement with rigorous theoretical results. Her work is a significant step in turning the theory into a practical tool that engineers doing fracture mechanics may use to model their systems.