Multifractal fracture

The observations presented herein, qualitative arguments, and exploratory calculations have indicated that material fracture can be modeled with a multifractal concept. As such, the associated multifractal diagram provides a new and possibly useful relationship between complex damage geometries and their fracture energies for brittle, ductile, and mixed processes. In particular, recent observations of ductile fracture behavior were found to be consistent with the multifractal diagram. This diagram implicitly includes interactive damage mechanisms prevalent in composites and other heterogeneous materials (e.g. 4340 and 300 Grade steels and Ti base alloys). Preliminary calculations with a proposed model were demonstrated to be verifiable by comparison to measured fracture surface dimensions. When verified, this model may also provide a new materials design tool. A previously proposed method to determine fracture energies from fracture surface roughnesses was confirmed, and a method for computing an associated material constant was suggested. 19 ref.--AA