Research summary
The phenomenon of fracture is ubiquitous and can significant economic, technological, and societal impacts-from manufacturing to advanced materials design, healthcare, and climate change mitigation. Researchers in the field of fracture mechanics are concerned with understanding and predicting where and when cracks develop and propagate in materials and structures.
As Canada Research Chair in Mathematical and Computational Aspects of Solid Mechanics, Dr. Blaise Bourdin combines mathematics, mechanics, and scientific computing to develop variational phase-field models of fracture that can predict the evolution of new and existing complex crack patterns in a broad range of situations. The work of Dr. Bourdin and his research team enables the numerical simulation of large-scale real-life problems and can be used to improve the design and manufacture of materials with extreme fracture properties or generate knowledge about how natural and made-made materials (such as implants and prostheses) interact.