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Interface Tension Action / Rice J-Integral
DT
Most failures begin at a join — render meeting masonry, a coating meeting its surface, growth meeting stone. Borrowing a principle from engineering fracture mechanics, we measure how much stress concentrates at these boundaries and how close they sit to giving way, so we can spot where trouble will start before it spreads.
Interface Tension Action borrows the Rice J-Integral — a path-independent measure of the energy available to drive a crack at a material interface in fracture mechanics — to quantify the stress concentrated at boundaries within a building's fabric and at the organism–substrate interface. It measures how close a junction (render-to-masonry, coating-to-substrate, biofilm-to-stone) is to its failure threshold, feeding the susceptibility-tension coupling that predicts where disturbances propagate and where degradation will localise.
susceptibility-tension coupling
Interface Tension Action borrows the Rice J-Integral — a path-independent measure of the energy available to drive a crack at a material interface in fracture mechanics — to quantify the stress concentrated at boundaries within a building's fabric and at the organism–substrate interface. It measures how close a junction (render-to-masonry, coating-to-substrate, biofilm-to-stone) is to its failure threshold, feeding the susceptibility-tension coupling that predicts where disturbances propagate and where degradation will localise.
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