Applications
Photoelasticity has been used for a variety of stress analyses and even for routine use in design, particularly before the advent of numerical methods, such as for instance finite elements or boundary elements.
Photoelasticity can successfully be used to investigate the highly localized stress state within masonry or in proximity of a rigid line inclusion (stiffener) embedded in an elastic medium. In the former case, the problem is nonlinear due to the contacts between bricks, while in the latter case the elastic solution is singular, so that numerical methods may fail to provide correct results. These can be obtained through photoelastic techniques.
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