Researchers from the University of Seville predict when your bone or a plate will break

The project predicts when cracks or fractures will occur in various materialsCurrently, in a few hours it can be known when a human femur would breakThe project is part of the Night of Researchers in SevilleThe idea crosses our minds at some point of breaking a bone, although it is more common to worry about when the crack that has appeared in our plate and that has been there for months will finish its work. It can be avoided? How can we know when it will break? A project of the University of Seville together with other universities aims to provide an answer to these types of questions. The ‘NewFrac’ project is presented to the Spanish public at the European Night of Universities that takes place in the Plaza Nueva in Seville this Friday. With this work, doctoral students from several countries have contributed to a model that aims to predict in a short time when various materials in nature can suffer a crack and subsequent breakage.”It all started in discussions at international fracture congresses and, in 2016, we saw that we wanted to do something”, explains Vladislav Mantic, Professor of Continuum Mechanics and Theory of Structures at the University of Seville, about the beginnings of the project. He is one of those responsible for the official start of this process in May 2020, although he came from behind. “We presented three proposals three years in a row until they accepted us,” says Mantic. The process, once the machinery is up and running, has not been easy. Doctoral students from different parts of the world at European universities have contributed to the creation of a computational model that can predict “cracks in materials such as bones, photovoltaic plates or ceramics”. Calculating when a femur will break Each university has focused on specific studies according to their application areas. One of the most striking is at Tel Aviv University. There, applied to the field of medicine, the model is used to predict under what circumstances a patient’s femur could break. “You just have to scan the bone and enter the data into the model and, in a few hours, you know, for example, what weight loads the bone would fracture with,” says Mantic. Although it sounds promising, it’s just the beginning. Although now it ‘only’ takes hours, the idea is that the model can give an answer in much less time, so that doctors can make decisions about the advisability, for example, of performing surgical interventions, something that is “very complex.” “In Seville, the work of the doctoral students, one from India and the other from Italy, focuses on other aspects. One of them in the initiation of cracks with “coupled criteria”, while the other works looking for resistant structures in nature to learn more about them. Something key for another of the steps that is sought to be taken. “We not only want to predict when the fracture will occur,” says Vladislav Mantic, “it will also be possible to produce resistant structures with sufficient tenacity to prevent them.” Exposed to the publicIn the afternoon-evening On Friday, along with dozens of other projects, the ‘NewFrac’ will be open to visitors to the Plaza Nueva in the capital of Seville on Researchers’ Night. There, the most curious will be able to see details of the work of the doctoral students and, in addition, see practical cases of those that have been worked on in Seville with examples on carbon fiber, fabrics or aluminum.