The bulk of Professor Curtin's research is in the general area of mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials, with an emphasis on quantitative predictions of material failure. For most properties of heterogeneous materials, some type of averaging is applicable to determine the macroscopic material response. The failure strength is thus an extensive property of the material. Composites, and particularly fiber-reinforced composites, are nearly ideal heterogeneous materials because many of the sources of heterogeneity and material constitutive properties can be identified a priori .
Composites are also technologically important advanced structural materials.
Much of Professor Curtin's research has thus emphasized damage evolution and failure in composites. The research combines numerical simulations and analytic statistical models for describing the evolving distribution of defects under increasing load. The numerical simulations provide data to guide the development of analytic models and to demonstrate significant features of the failure process. The analytic models capture the key interactions and length scales in the problem, and provide predictions for much larger physical sizes than can be studied numerically. Professor Curtin is also interested in the connections between mechanical phenomena at the atomic scale, where individual atomic interactions are important, and at the continuum-scale, where material is considered a homogeneous continuum.