Fracture Sciences

Researchers in SRI's Center for Fracture Physics have a passion for understanding how and why things break, and finding ways to keep them from breaking. We are scientists, engineers, physicists, and corrosion experts combining our knowledge and experience to advance the fracture sciences.

We achieved a major advance in fractography, Fracture Surface Topography Analysis, or FRASTA , that reveals details of a crack front interacting with material microstructure, measures the fracture toughness of a component without the need of a laboratory test, and can often reconstruct a failure event.

We are unlocking the secrets of the remarkable fracture properties of metallic glasses.

We have special expertise in fracture under dynamic loads shock physics and are skilled at performing experiments and computations of impact and explosive scenarios.

Contact Us
Don Shockey
Director, Center for Fracture Physics
Phone: 650-859-2587
Email: donald.shockey@sri.com