Description
While there have been major advances in recent years in our understanding of the mechanisms that lead to ductile fracture and our ability to model the details of the fracture process, we still lack the capability of predicting the ductility of commercial alloys based on a knowledge of the microstructure. Moreover, the correlation between failure in simple tests and that in complex processes involving, for example, metal forming, vehicle crash or impact, is not well developed. This symposium will therefore provide an opportunity to survey the current state of the field and to examine the experimental and modeling approaches that need to be followed to correlate tensile ductility with fracture under complex loading scenarios. This is timely since many industries (such as transportation and energy) require that materials users carry out complex tests, such as hole expansion or even full-scale testing, to qualify materials for many applications. As we move towards new material solutions (involving higher strength grades, or lightweight, multi-material approaches for example) it remains unclear whether such tests remain good predictors of performance, whether in component fabrication or in service. Moreover, since higher strength materials inevitably have lower ductility, fracture toughness becomes critical. There is evidence to suggest that the expected correlation between ductility and toughness breaks down. Finally, the process of ductile fracture is highly dependent on both stress state (in particular the degree of triaxiality) and the strain path. This symposium will enable a robust discussion of these issues by practitioners drawn from a range of disciplines and backgrounds.
Examples of pertinent topics include the following:
- Mechanisms of fracture in materials with complex microstructures
- Experimental approaches to the study of damage during complex loading
- Mechanism-based analytical and computational modeling and simulation
- The relationship between ductility and fracture toughness in high strength alloys
- Damage development during materials processing (e.g. edge cracking and welding)
- Competition between plastic localization and ductile cracking dominated failure modes
- The impact of strain path and test geometry (e.g. tension, bending and hole expansion) on failure processes
Organizers
David Wilkinson (McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada)
Thomas Pardoen (Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium)
Amine Benzerga (Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA)
Contact
David Wilkinson (email: wilkinso@mcmaster.ca)