Contralateral leg deficits between lower limbs during athletic movements are thought to increase the risk of injury and compromise performance. The purpose of this study was to quantify the magnitude of leg deficits during running in noninjured and previously injured Australian Rules football (ARF) players. The players included a group of noninjured ARF players (n = 11) and a group of previously injured ARF players (n = 11; hamstring injuries only). The players in the injured group (IG) had at least 1 acute hamstring injury in the previous 2 years. The legs of the noninjured players (NIG) were classified as right and left, whereas the legs of the injured players were classified as injured or noninjured. The players ran on a nonmotorized force treadmill at approximately 80% of their maximum velocity (Vmax). For the NIG, there were no significant differences between right and left legs for any of the variables. For the IG, the only variable that was significantly (p < 0.001) different between the injured and noninjured leg was horizontal force (175 +/- 30 vs. 326 +/- 44 N). Furthermore, horizontal force was significantly greater in the noninjured leg (IG) in comparison with either legs in the NIG (19.2% and 20.5%) and significantly less in the injured leg (IG) in comparison with either legs of the NIG (31.5% and 32.7%). In the present study, athletes with previous hamstring injuries had contralateral leg deficits in horizontal but not vertical force during running at submaximal velocities.

The results from a new numerical method for simulating the strength and fracture locations of small glass specimens subjected to double ring bending are compared with experimental data. The method implements the weakest-link principle while assuming the existence of Griffith flaws. A Weibull distribution for the strength is simulated based on a single population of Pareto distributed crack sizes. The effect of using different fracture criteria is investigated. An alternative distribution is simulated based on two populations of flaws. This distribution models the apparent bimodality in the empirical data set. The numerical method is dependent on a representation of the surface flaws condition in glass. As new techniques become available for examining the surface characteristics, this numerical method is promising as a means for modelling the strength better than current methods do.

Experimental data on the strength of new annealed float glass tested in an ambient environment was collected. A comparison was made between four standard distributions, the normal, lognormal, Gumbel and Weibull, with respect to the performance in modelling the strength. The Weibull distribution outperformed the normal and lognormal distributions when the data contained edge only failure origins. When the data was selected to contain surface only failure origins it is indicated that the extreme value distributions performed poorly. The Weibull model is known to have a basis in a failure-mechanism concept based on the weakest-link principle. The Gumbel distribution can also be derived from failure-based mechanics and be associated with certain types of flaw size distribution. The Weibull model, however, is a better choice for a failure model of glass edge strength compared to the normal and lognormal distributions and at least as good as a Gumbel distribution. The surface strength is complicated to model and none of the standard distributions which were examined are capable of producing a proper model. The sample size also has a profound impact on the performance of the surface strength models.

Architectural trends increasingly challenge material producers and engineers to create sustainable, renewable and innovative laminated glass products that combine multiple functions as in, for example, glass railings with solar cells, curved laminated glass, floors with light emitting diodes that serve as multimedia screens. All new tendencies require the development of interlayers for laminated glass, which allows laminating electrical parts, solar cells or other objects between two glass plies. For this complex lamination process, the most appropriate interlayer is Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA), because its properties allow for working in low temperatures without autoclave. From the other hand, EVA material has not been defined and discussed entirely in prEN16613 standard as a suitable interlayer material, for example, for structures application like Polyvinyl Butyral (PVB) interlayer. For this reason, EVA interlayer laminates must be investigated and compared with PVB or similar interlayer laminates to evaluate its mechanical behaviour. The research paper gives an idea and compares the structural behaviour and fracture pattern and evaluates laminated glass samples with PVB, Ionoplast and EVA interlayers. Under practical circumstances, glass structures need to be designed to withstand bending stresses which may occur, e.g., due to lateral loading, that means that four-point bending tests is appropriate method for the evaluation of structural behavior. Tests were also modelled in the Finite Element (FE) ABAQUS/CAE software to calculate displacements and evaluate bending stresses. According to current research, the conclusion can be drawn that for samples with EVA interlayer, stiffness is equivalent to PVB interlayer specimens' results and EVA interlayer can be used in the same cases as PVB material. Moreover, using FE method makes it possible to simulate accurately the mechanical behaviour of laminated glass tested in 4-point bending with high result correlation with error less than 5% while the analytical calculations show error of 10-58%.

Experimental strength tests are performed on two series of nominally equal plate specimens of annealed soda-lime glass subjected to either ring-on-ring or ball-on-ring bending. The Weibull effective area which represents a fictitious surface area exposed to uniform tension is calculated using closed-form solutions. Finite-size weakest-link systems are implemented numerically in a computationally intensive procedure for random sampling of plates extracted from a virtual jumbo pane whose surface area contains a set of stochastic Griffith flaws. A non-linear finite element analysis is conducted to compute the bending stresses. The glass surface condition is represented in different flaw-size concepts that depend on a truncated exponentially decaying flaw-size distribution. Stress corrosion effects are modelled by implementation of subcritical crack growth. The effective ball contacting radius is determined in a numerical computation. The results show that surface size effects in glass are not only a matter of strength-scaling, as also the shape of the distribution changes. While the lowest strength value, as per the major in-plane principal stress at the recorded fracture origin, in the respective data sets is very similar, the strongest specimen observed in ball-on-ring testing is over 70% stronger than the correspondingly strongest specimen observed in ring-on-ring bending. The Shift function is used to make visual comparisons of the difference in quantiles in the observed data sets. Use of an ordinary Weibull distribution leads to non-conservative strength predictions on smaller effective areas, and to too low strength predictions than are viable for glass design on larger areas. The numerical implementation of finite-size weakest-link systems can produce better predictions for the strength-scaling compared to a Weibull distribution, in particular when the flaw-size concept is modified to include a doubly stochastic flaw-size distribution or a random noise added to each subdivided region of the discretized surface area. The simulated ball-on-ring fracture origins exhibit greater spread from the centre point than otherwise observed in laboratory tests. It is indicated that the chosen representation of surface condition may not be accurate enough for the modelling of all fracture origins in the ball-on-ring setup even though acceptable results are obtained with the ring-on-ring model. There is a need for more insight into the surface condition of glass which can be conducive to the development of flaw-size based weakest-link modelling.