Fracture and Failure of Adhesives

This article presents an overview of methods for analyzing the facture and failure of adhesives. Special attention is given to stress analysis in adhesive bonds, as the difficulty of performing an accurate stress analysis is a major limitation of many failure analysis methods. The article also covers the effect of manufacturing and...

Bondline thickness: Fracture mechanics perspective

The bondline thickness is a crucial parameter affecting the strength and toughness of adhesive joints. This parameter is responsible for the stress distribution, and thus, the efficiency of the stress transfer between the adherends, the failure modes, and the correspondent failure loads. However, the available literature reports different...

Rheology of Mud: An Overview for Ports and Waterways Applications

Mud, a cohesive material, consists of water, clay minerals, sand, silt and small quantities of organic matter (i.e., biopolymers). Amongst the different mud layers formed by human or natural activities, the fluid mud layer found on top of all the others is quite important from navigational point of view in ports and waterways. Rheological...

Non-Intrusive Characterization and Monitoring of Fluid Mud: Laboratory Experiments with Seismic Techniques, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), and Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS)

In ports and waterways, the bathymetry is regularly surveyed for updating navigation charts ensuring safe transport. In port areas with fluid-mud layers, most traditional surveying techniques are accurate but are intrusive and provide one-dimensional measurements limiting their application. Current non-intrusive surveying techniques are less...

Reliability and Lifetime Assessment of Optical Materials in LED-Based Products

Lumen depreciation is one of the major failure modes in light-emitting diode (LED) systems. It originates from the degradation of the different components within the system, including the chip, the driver, and the optical materials (i.e., phosphorous layer). The kinetics of degradation in real-life applications is relatively slow, and in most...

Blueprint for the STIG1.0: setting the performance indicators

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) have been developed over the last decades all over the world. SDI is the integration of several components to create a platform which enables a wide variety of stakeholders to access, share and use spatial data in an efficient and effective way. To stimulate the SDI development effectively and efficiently, it...

State of the Art in Technology-Supported Resilience Training For Military Professionals

Certain professions carry a risk of experiencing traumatic events and sometimes developing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Researchers have been working on strategies to prevent professionals in those fields from developing PTSD. Recently, there has been a focus on applying technology that supports these preventive strategies, especially...