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This paper has the purpose of highlighting the achievements during the last decades in life modeling under electrothermal stress. Phenomenological and physical models are examined, considering also a statistical approach, with applications to experimental results..

This paper presents a numerical procedure for cohesive hydraulic fracture problems in a multiphase system. The transient problem of crack nucleation and/or advancement, with the ensuing topological changes, is solved by successive remeshing and projection of the field variables required in the time marching scheme. The projection is directly applied to the nodal vector of the previous step and is performed by means of a suitable mapping operator which acts on nodal forces and fluxes. This hence ensures 'a priori' the local fulfilment of the balance equations (equilibrium and mass conservation). The resulting procedure is computationally simple; however checks have to be made on its capability of conserving strain energy of the system. The latter property together with the accuracy of the solution is heuristically assessed on the basis of numerical benchmarks. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

A fully coupled numerical model to simulate the complex behaviour of soil deformation, water flow, airflow, and heat flow in porous media is developed. The following thermal effects are taken into account: heat transfer through conduction and convection, flow, as well as viscosity and density variation of the fluids due to temperature gradients. The governing equations in terms of soil displacements, water and air pressures, and temperature are coupled non-linear partial differential equations and are solved by the finite element method. Two examples are presented to demonstrate the model performances