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Cornell Fracture Group

The CFG members include Prof. Tony Ingraffea, research associates, and graduate students. The CFG mission is to create, to verify, and to validate state-of-the-art computational fracture mechanics simulators for arbitrary crack propagation in engineered and natural structures. We have included some tutorial and demo simulations to illustrate some of the features and capabilities of the simulators. An equally important focus of the group is education at all levels. Our current and past research has focused on both experimental testing and numerical simulation of fatigue and fracture in a variety of materials. The research has been documented and cited in a number of theses, conference proceedings, reports, and journal articles.

Recruitment advertisement.

Software Releases and Updates

	Version 3.2 of FRANC3D and OSM for RedHat Linux, and MS Windows have been posted. Documentation will be posted for version 3.2 if we ever get time to update it.
	Updates to BES have been posted.
	Updates to FRANC2D and Cornell's FRANC2D/L have been posted. The castofranc translator has been updated to work with Cornell's version of CASCA and FRANC2D/L. castofranc is available from the Cornell FRANC2D/L software page. Note that the KSU version or other older versions of CASCA, FRANC2D and FRANC2D/L used fixed fields of width 5 to list node id's for elements. We now use a free format and old versions of the code will not work with the new format.

NOTE: we try to test all links and all versions of all codes, but if you find a problem - please send us email.

Disclaimer

If you download and use the software made available here, please read the Policy Statement on the Software page. Also please read the News&FAQs if you have trouble using the software, especially 'Cygwin' executables. We will attempt to answer questions or fix problems in the software, but we are not obligated to provide such service. If you do ask for help with a particular problem, please provide as much detail as possible including input files, drawings, etc. The software that is provided here is intended for people with experience in fracture mechanics and boundary or finite elements. Please do not ask us for items that are not made available here - these types of requests will likely be ignored.

CFG Highlights

DARPA TECH 2007
Professor Ingraffea, Gerd Heber, Mike Veilleux attended the DARPA Tech meeting:
http://www.darpa.mil/
DARPATech2007/index.html

Bridge Collapse
Professor Ingraffea was interviewed to help provide insights into the recent bridge collapse in Minneapolis:
http://www.pbs.org/
newshour/bb/transportation
/july-dec07/collapse_08-02.html

Things age. Everything we build doesn't last forever. The older these things get, the less reliable are our predictions of their future safety. So inspections have to be happening more frequently.

FraMCoS-6 June 17-22, 2007
John Emery, Jake Hochhalter and Professor Ingraffea recently delivered
the plenary session presentation that led off the conference. Using supercomputing to assist in simulation of crack growth in a multiscale method was presented and analogies between simulation trends in concrete and aluminum were drawn. The paper and presentation are available along with a simple movie demo.

George R. Irwin Medal of the American Society for Testing and Materials presented to Anthony R. Ingraffea November 13, 2006 in recognition of his pioneering and outstanding contributions to the advanced computational simulation of fatigue and fracture processes and the resulting improved understanding necessary for practical applications of fracture mechanics to the assessment of integrity in engineering structures. This award is largely the result of collaboration with Dr. Wash Wawrzynek and Dr. Bruce Carter, Research Associates in the Cornell Fracture Group.