The new technique called Scan and Solve was developed by the researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Florida International University and allows engineers and sculptors to check whether a building or statue has areas that could crack sooner or later.
The program uses 3D data of the objects to foretell where they are most likely to crease, and how their weak points will be affected by outside forces such as gravity. The David statue of Michelangelo was used as an example, and it predicted the most sensitive areas. The sculpture already suffered damage from several clefts, exactly in the zones Scan and Solve found to be vulnerable.
The method, however, is made for analyzing objects that didn’t crack yet, and researchers are already gaining new perspective on how these structures are likely to fail. Among others, doctors can have a better understanding on how bones are more likely to break, by analyzing them with the new software.
May 20th, 2008 at 8:44 am
There is plenty of medical data available about how limbs break on people with normal physiology, if it were only collected, to predict how and what to expect. We had information available 15 years ago that in a car accident, moving vehicle, if the feet are on the automobile pedals, one looks for fractures of ankle, knee, hip and lower spine. Follow the stress in straight lines back and/or up to see where it goes.