James C. Newman

James C. Newman is an American engineer and materials scientist known for his work on fracture and fatigue for aerospace vehicles. NASA has listed him as a "Superstar of Modern Aeronautics".
He is also known for his work in safety analysis of structures, and pioneered the finite element studies of planar cracks in three-dimensional finite bodies, and the development of extensive stress intensity factor equations. These solutions are now considered to be classic contributions to Fracture Mechanics, and are used as benchmarks for new crack stress analysis methods.
His work is also used for modeling of fatigue crack growth under aircraft spectrum loading. He developed the theory and software (FASTRAN), which is widely used in aircraft industry.
In 2001, Dr. Newman left NASA for a professorship at Mississippi State University. There, he has developed a Fatigue and Fracture Laboratory and a new ASTM fracture standard (E-2472).
A majority of the stress-intensity-factor solutions for crack configurations in the ASTM fatigue-crack growth and fracture standards were developed by Dr. Newman. His stress-intensity-factor solutions and equations for three-dimensional crack configurations, such as surface cracks and corner cracks at holes, are used by aerospace, nuclear and piping industries worldwide. His life-prediction model and code (FASTRAN) is used worldwide to make life assessments of damaged aircraft structures. His crack-closure model is also one of the life-prediction options in NASGRO, a life-prediction code, which is also used worldwide. His life-prediction code was successfully used to predict the onset of widespread fatigue damage in simulated aircraft fuselage components during the NASA/FAA aging aircraft studies in the 1990s.
He has pioneered the use of the critical crack-tip-opening-angle (CTOA) fracture criterion for aircraft structures, which was successfully used by Boeing-Long Beach to predict the residual strength of a damaged fuselage structure tested at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base within 5% of the failure pressure. Recently, he has promoted the use of the compression precracking test methods to generate fatigue-crack-growth threshold data without load-history effects.