Failure time, critical behaviour and activation processes in crack formation

In this seminar we will review several experimental and theoretical aspects of two very important problems of material failure: crack precursors and crack prediction. We will summarize the results of several experiments and numerical simulations that we have performed in order to give new insight on these two important problems. Specifically the acoustic emission of fracture precursors, and the failure time of samples made of heterogeneous materials (wood, fiberglass) are studied as a function of the load features and geometry