A computational study of the influence of surface roughness on material strength

In machine component stress analysis, it usually assumed that the geometry specified in CAD provides a fair representation of the geometry of the real component. While in particular circumstances, tolerance information, such as minimum thickness of a highly stressed region, might be taken into consideration, there is no standard practice for the representation of surface quality. It is known that surface roughness significantly influences fatigue life, but for this to be useful in the context of life prediction, there is a need to examine the nature of surface roughness and determine how best to characterise it. Non-smooth geometry can be represented in mathematics by fractals or other methods, but for a representation to have a practical value for a manufactured component, it is necessary to accept that there is a lower limit to surface profile measurement resolution. Resolution and mesh refinement also play a part in any computational analysis undertaken to assess surface profile effects: in the analyses presented, a nominal axi-symmetric geometry has been taken, with a finite non-smooth region on the boundary. Various surface roughness representations are modelled, and the significance of the characterized surface roughness type is investigated. It is shown that the applied load gives rise to a nominally uni-axial stress state of 90% of the yield, although surface roughness features have the effect of modifying the load path, and give rise to localized regions of plasticity near to the surface. The material of the test model is assumed to be elasto-plastic, and the development and evolution of plastic zones formed within the geometry are shown for multiple load cycles

Multiscale Methods for Wave Propagation in Heterogeneous Media Over Long Time

Multiscale wave propagation problems are computationally costly to solve by traditional techniques because the smallest scales must be represented over a domain determined by the largest scales of the problem. We have developed and analyzed new numerical methods for multiscale wave propagation in the framework of the heterogeneous multiscale method (HMM). The numerical methods couple simulations on macro- and microscales for problems with rapidly oscillating coefficients. The complexity of the new method is significantly lower than that of traditional techniques with a computational cost that is essentially independent of the smallest scale, when computing solutions at a fixed time and accuracy. We show numerical examples of the HMM applied to long time integration of wave propagation problems in both periodic and non-periodic medium. In both cases our HMM accurately captures the dispersive effects that occur. We also give a stability proof for the HMM, when it is applied to long time wave propagation problems.QC 20111116</p