Fracture and damage at a microstructural scale

Studying fracture surfaces of materials has been very useful in discriminating between different theoretical models. In the future, models and simulations should be able to help design suitable microstructures for tough materials. It is concluded that experiments in quantitative fractography perhaps have raised more questions than answers. However, they have proved useful in discriminating between theoretical models, and hence in defining the problem's relevant quantities. Further experiments are needed on various materials. Experiments are needed on metallic materials, for which the scaling domain extends over five decades of length scales. In this case, a high resolution 3D reconstruction from the observation of SEM stereo pairs could significantly alleviate the practical difficulties linked with the experimental procedure.