Looking Ahead
 A future section will be on probabilistic aspects of failure behavior and related failure criteria. In the physical world nothing is absolutely, purely deterministic. There is always variability. For most practical purposes the variability can be smoothed over and only mean value effects considered. There are situations however where the variability is so great, or the design requirements so narrow, that variability cannot be ignored. Examples of these situations will be given and rules or classes of problems will be identified where the probabilistic aspects of the failure problem represents the major challenge to be confronted. Of particular interest will be Weibul statistics. Reasons will be sought to explain the special relationship of Weibul type behavior to the classes of material failure problems of interest here.
Future possibilities for this website include such interrelated topics as:
- The statistics of failure
- Damage detection for structural health monitoring
- Rationale for the accelerated testing of materials life
- High rate failure processes
- The size/scale effect in failure
- The theoretical (ideal) strength of materials
- Designing with Brittle Materials
- Nano-scale aspects of failure and failure criteria
Other specific topics of interest and relevance may evolve.
A separate text/research book may be written on materials failure and failure criteria. If undertaken, the book will be closely related to this website but with a considerably different purpose and organized entirely differently.
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