Quantification of subsurface damage in a brittle insulating ceramic by three-dimensional focused ion beam tomography.

In this study, we present a fully automated method to investigate and reconstruct the three-dimensional crack structure beneath an indent in a highly insulating material. This work concentrates on issues arising from a long automatic acquisition process, the insulating nature of the specimen, and the introduction of minimal damage to the original cracks resulting from indentation.

Minimum solid area models applied to the prediction of Young's modulus for cancellous bone.

In developing models for the mechanical behavior of cancellous bone, accurate prediction of Young's modulus as a function of the pore fraction and morphology is a requirement. Previous workers have suggested models which provide good statistical fits, but most of these models are highly idealized, with no treatment of the actual morphology of the porosity. In the field of engineering ceramics, simple minimum solid area models have been developed over the past four decades to describe the mechanical properties of porous structural ceramics. This paper applies these models to data for cancellous bone, and it is shown that one, developed specifically for high porosity materials, gives realistic predictions of tissue modulus and a good statistical fit to well-established data. This model should prove to be useful in biomechanical analyses involving cancellous bone tissue.