Fracture and Complexity: One Century since Griffith's Milestone

The book explores the two opposite natural trends of composite systems: (i) order and structure emerging from heterogeneity and randomness, and (ii) instability and chaos arising from simple nonlinear rules. Providing insights into the rapidly growing field of complexity sciences, the book focuses on the role of complexity in fracture mechanics. It firstly discusses the occurrence of self-similarity and fractal patterns in deformation, damage, fracture, and fragmentation of heterogeneous ma...