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| Name |
Bažant, Zdenek P. |
| Location
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Northwestern University - Evanston |
| Primary Field
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Engineering Sciences |
| Secondary Field
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Applied Physical Sciences |
 Election Citation
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Bazant is an engineer who discovered the scaling law for the energetic size effect in quasibrittle structural failure. He verified this law experimentally for many important materials, showed its use for measuring fracture characteristics, and generated models widely used in numerical simulations of structure failure. |
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Research Interests
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Working first as a structural engineer, I became skeptical of the codified empirical design procedures guarding against quasi-brittle structural failure preceded by distributed cracking and stable fracture growth. The inherent size effects on structural strength were generally attributed to material randomness. My assistants and I demonstrated that this disagreed with experiments. I realized that these effects are caused by stress redistributions and stored energy release, and can be easily capt |
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