The Development and Validation of the Creep Damage Constitutive Equations for P91 Alloy

This paper presents research on the validation of a set of creep damage constitutive equations for P91 alloy under multi-axial states of stress, and its applicability under lower stress level. Creep damage is one of the serious problems for the high temperature industries and computational creep damage has been developed and used, complementary to the experimental approach, to assist safe operation. In creep damage mechanics, a set of constitutive equations needs to be developed and validated. Recently, a mechanism based approach for the developing creep damage constitutive equation for this type of high Cr alloy has merged and several versions of creep damage constitutive equations have been proposed. However, so far, they are limited to uni-axial case under medium to high stress level. In fact, multi-axial states of stress and lower stress level are more pertinent to the real industrial applications. That is the objective of this research. This paper contributes to the methodology and specific knowledge

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Low-impulse blast behaviour of fibre-metal laminates

This paper presents three dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) models of the low-impulse localised blast loading response of fibre-metal laminates (FMLs) based on an 2024-O aluminium alloy and a woven glass-fibre/polypropylene composite (GFPP). A vectorized user material subroutine (VUMAT) is developed to define the mechanical constitutive behaviour and Hashin’s 3D failure criteria incorporating strain-rate effects in the GFPP. In order to apply localised blast loading, a user subroutine VDLOAD is used to model the pressure distribution over the exposed area of the plate. These subroutines are implemented into the commercial finite element code ABAQUS/Explicit to model the deformation and failure mechanisms in FMLs. The FE models consider FMLs based on various stacking configurations. Both the transient and permanent displacements of the laminates are investigated. Good correlation is obtained between the measured experimental and numerical displacements, the panel deformations and failure modes. By using the validated models, parametric studies can be carried out to optimise the blast resistance of FMLs based on a range of stacking sequences and layer thicknesses

The development of computational FE system for creep damage analysis of weldment

A Finite Element Analysis (FEA) system was designed for the analysis of creep deformation and damage evolution in weldment. This project essentially consists of three parts which involves 1) transfer programme development, 2) numerical integration subroutine development, and 3) validation of complete FEA system. Firstly, the development of a user-friendly pre- and post- processing transfer programme and its assembly with the numerical solver was reported; its primary development was published before. This part includes file format understanding, specific parameter adding, and transfer algorithm design. Secondly, a numerical integration subroutine which developed for specific creep constitutive equations was introduced. This part includes the numerical method selection, accuracy control in finite element method, and its validation. Thirdly, because this project has not finished yet, a demonstration how this system works was assumed in future work. For this part, a circumferentially notched bar with low Cr alloy material case was purposed to prove the capability of transfer programme and integration subroutine

Evaluation of a self-equilibrium cutting strategy for the contour method of residual stress measurement

An assessment of cutting-induced plasticity (CIP) is performed, by finite element (FE) prediction of the plastic strain accumulation along the cut tip when the EDM wire sections the NeT TG4 weld benchmark specimen along two cutting directions. The first direction corresponds to a conventional (C) cutting strategy, whereby the EDM wire cuts through the thickness of the weld specimen and travels in a direction transverse to the weld. The second direction corresponds to a self-equilibrating cutting (SE) strategy, whereby the EDM wire cuts across the transverse direction of the weld specimens and travels through the thickness of the plate. The cutting thus progresses simultaneously through the compression-tension-compression regions of present weld residual stress (WRS) field. This type of cutting strategy is believed to minimize the CIP by minimising residual stress redistribution during cutting, due to stress equilibration across the sectioned material. The simulated cutting procedures are conducted under a range of clamping conditions to assess whether mechanical restraint has a primary or secondary influence on CIP accumulation. Both predictions of CIP and the resultant back-calculated WRS demonstrate that (i) mechanical restraint is the primary variable influencing CIP development, and (ii) under no circumstance does a self-equilibrating cutting strategy perform significantly better than a conventional cutting approach. The reason that self-equilibrating cuts are not effective is illustrated by calculating the Mode I (KI) stress intensity factor (SIF) along the cut tip, and correlating trends in KI to CIP development

Modelling of the low-impulse blast behaviour of fibre–metal laminates based on different aluminium alloys

A parametric study has been undertaken in order to investigate the influence of the properties of the aluminium alloy on the blast response of fibre–metal laminates (FMLs). The finite element (FE) models have been developed and validated using experimental data from tests on FMLs based on a 2024-O aluminium alloy and a woven glass–fibre/polypropylene composite (GFPP). A vectorized user material subroutine (VUMAT) was employed to define Hashin’s 3D rate-dependant damage constitutive model of the GFPP. Using the validated models, a parametric study has been carried out to investigate the blast resistance of FML panels based on the four aluminium alloys, namely 2024-O, 2024-T3, 6061-T6 and 7075-T6. It has been shown that there is an approximation linear relationship between the dimensionless back face displacement and the dimensionless impulse for all aluminium alloys investigated here. It has also shown that the residual displacement of back surface of the FML panels and the internal debonding are dependent on the yield strength of the aluminium alloy