New technologies often bring along new fracture issues as they develop, or they place a renewed focus on some existing aspects of fracture. For example, electronic packaging, as it developed as a technology, led to a renewed focus on fracture caused by thermal stresses and thermal expansion mismatch. It also required much research on cracks at the interface between two materials, layered systems and channel and mud cracking. More recently, the development of lithium-ion batteries caused extensive work on fracture due to lithiation swelling in electrode storage particles and on crack-like lithium filament growth in solid electrolytes. Medical implants require much attention to fatigue fracture in their design, and utilization of some materials including Nitinol has brought forward new research on fatigue failure and its mechanisms. The highly variable human physiology causes the implants to be in diverse conditions and environments, leading to a renewed focus on reliability engineering for fatigue failure.
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