James C. Newman is an American engineer and materials scientist known for his work on fracture and fatigue for aerospace vehicles.
These solutions are now considered to be classic contributions to Fracture Mechanics, and are used as benchmarks for new crack stress analysis methods.
He developed the theory for predicting plasticity induced crack closure and software Fastran,[3] which is widely used in the aircraft industry.
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.