PSI - Issue 26

Jesús Toribio et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 26 (2020) 354–359 Toribio / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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3. Fracture & structural integrity: A multi-scale approach 3.1. Initial reflections

Any material can be considered as a structure (a quite more general concept with a broader meaning and comprising also, e.g., the structure of a Bach’s fugue or of a Beethoven’s symphony), and thus not all structures are materials: there are inmaterial structures . Thus all materials are structures but some structures are not materials. In the following sections, the concept of structural integrity is re-visited at different length scales, using examples of previous research of the author on progressively cold drawn pearlitic steels (Toribio, 2018).

3.2. Mega-structural integrity

The term mega-structural integrity may be introduced for avoiding the risk or failure or collapse of real engineering (mega)structures, e.g., bridges (see Figs. 2-4).

Fig. 2. Puente del Pedrido (Pedrido bridge) in La Coruña (Galicia, Spain).

Fig. 3. Ponte do Infante (Infante bridge) in Porto (Portugal).

Fig. 4. Akashi Kaikyō bridge in Kobe (Japan).