Mechanics of Materials

All up-to-date engineering applications of advanced multi-phase materials necessitate a concurrent design of materials (including composition, processing routes, microstructures and properties) with structural components. Simulation-based material design requires an intensive interaction of solid state physics, material physics and chemistry, mathematics and information technology. Since mechanics of materials fuses many of the above fields, there is a pressing need for well founded quantitative analytical and numerical approaches to predict microstructure-process-property relationships taking into account hierarchical stationary or evolving microstructures. Owing to this hierarchy of length and time scales, novel approaches for describing/ modelling non-equilibrium material evolution with various degrees of resolution are crucial to linking solid mechanics with realistic material behavior. For example, approaches such as atomistic to continuum transitions (scale coupling), multiresolution numerics, and handshaking algorithms that pass information to models with different degrees of freedom are highly relevant in this context. Many of the topics addressed were dealt with in depth in this workshop

Thermo-mechanical modeling for selective laser melting

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) process where a powder bed is locally melted with a laser. Layer by layer, complex three dimensional geometries including overhangs can be produced. Up to date, the material and process development of SLM mainly relies on experimental studies that are time intensive and costly. Simulation tools offer the potential to gain a deeper understanding of the process - structure - property interaction. This can help to find optimal process parameters for individualized components and the processing of innovative powder materials. In this work, a rigorous thermo-mechanical framework for the finite deformation phase change problem is formulated. Beside the phase change, an additional peculiarity of the SLM process is the fusion of powder particles. Regarding the numerical solution, meshfree methods seem to be especially suited because the treatment of particle fusion is intrinsic to the formulation. The complex moving boundaries between liquid melt and solid metal can be resolved without additional numerical effort. The recently introduced Optimal Transportation Meshfree Method (OTM) has been chosen since it was promoted as a versatile tool for both fluid and solid mechanics. Special focus lays on the modeling of laser-matter interaction. The laser beam can be divided into moving discrete energy portions (rays) that are traced in space and time. In order to compute the reflection and absorption, usually a triangulation of the free surface is conducted. Within meshfree methods, this is a very expensive operation. To avoid the need for surface triangulation, a computationally efficient algorithm is presented which can easily be combined with meshfree methods. Both melt pool dynamics and residual stress formation are studied with the developed numerical framework. The influence of laser heating and cooling conditions on melting and consolidation is investigated. Although the numerical results are promising, it was found that the OTM exhibits some limitations. Therefore, the accuracy of the method is critically discussed

On the formulation of hereditary cohesive-zone models

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The thesis presents novel formulations of hereditary cohesive zone models able to capture rate-dependent crack propagation along a defined interface. The formulations rely on the assumption that the measured fracture energy is the sum of an intrinsic fracture energy, related to the rupture of primary bonds at the atomic or molecular level, and an additional dissipation caused by any irreversible mechanisms present in the material and occurring simultaneously to fracture. The first contribution can be accounted for by introducing damage-type internal variables, which are to be driven by a rateindependent evolution law in order to be coherent with the definition as intrinsic energy. It is then proposed that the additional dissipation can be satisfactorily characterised by the same continuum-type material constitutive law obeyed by the interface material considered as a continuum: it is postulated that the dimensional reduction whereby a three-dimensional thin layer is idealized as a surface does not qualitatively alter the functional description of the free energy. The specific application considered is mode-I crack propagation along a rubber interface. After focusing on viscoelasticity as a suitable candidate to reproduce rubber’s behaviour, firstly the most common relaxation function, namely a single exponential term, is considerd after which the attention is turned to the use of fractional calculus and the related fractional integral kernel. A comparison with experimental results is presented. A shortcoming of the proposed approach is then noted, in that certain features of experimentally measured responses (i.e.the non-monotonicity of the critical energy-release rate with respect to crack speed) will be shown to be out of reach for the described modelling paradigm. A novel micromechanical formulation is then sketched in an attempt to qualitatively understand the phenomenon. An additional interface damaging mode is introduced, physically inspired by the desire to reproduce the formation of fibrils in a neighbourhood of the crack tip. Fibril formation is then driven by a variational argument applied to the whole of the interface, yielding its non-local character. Upon the introduction of an anisotropic fracture energy, motivated by experimental considerations, it is noted how the model can predict a non-monotonic energy-release rate vs crack speed behaviour, at least for a simple loading mode.Dunlop Oil & Marine Ltd and EPSR

A meshless fading regularization algorithm for solving the Cauchy problem for the three-dimensional Helmholtz equation

International audienc

Advanced Testing and Characterization of Bituminous Materials, Two Volume Set

Bituminous materials are used to build durable roads that sustain diverse environmental conditions. However, due to their complexity and a global shortage of these materials, their design and technical development present several challenges. Advanced Testing and Characterisation of Bituminous Materials focuses on fundamental and performance testin

Advanced Testing and Characterization of Bituminous Materials, Two Volume Set

Bituminous materials are used to build durable roads that sustain diverse environmental conditions. However, due to their complexity and a global shortage of these materials, their design and technical development present several challenges. Advanced Testing and Characterisation of Bituminous Materials focuses on fundamental and performance testin