18th International Conference on the Strength of Materials (ICSMA 18)

ICSMA 18 builds on a 50-year tradition of providing an international venue for the latest advances in the strength of materials. Scientific topics provide comprehensive coverage of the field, from basic concepts of deformation to advanced engineering materials, and across composites, alloys, biomedical and bio-inspired materials, and emerging materials. The meeting will advance fundamental understanding of the processes that govern the strength of materials at different length and time scales, and it will forge links between basic studies and investigations of technologically important engineering materials. Thus, ICSMA 18 will offer a broad forum for the presentation and discussion of all aspects related to the strength and deformation of a wide range of materials. The conference will be held at The Ohio State University (USA), providing an open campus setting in which to meet.

Photo Credit: The Ohio State University Communication’s Photo Gallery

ICSMA 18 will take place at the Ohio Union (above) on the campus of The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, USA.

ICSMA 18 will begin on the evening of Sunday, July 15 with a an opening reception and conclude on the evening of Thursday, July 19 with a closing banquet. Each weekday morning will begin with a plenary session and transition to six concurrent sessions, all held in the convenience of the Ohio Union, a state-of-the-art meeting space integrated with restaurants and shopping along the High St. commercial district. Please see Special Events for information on networking and special events throughout the week.

Topic areas include:

• Advanced (including in situ) characterization of deformation processes
• Elementary deformation mechanisms in engineering materials
• Fracture and fatigue
• Friction and wear
• Glasses and non-crystalline solids
• High temperature deformation and creep
• Materials under extreme conditions
• Mechanical behavior associated with phase transformations
• Mechanistic foundations for multiscale modeling and ICME
• Micro-and nano-scale mechanical testing
• Effects of grain boundaries and interfaces
• Reinforcements at the sub-nanometer scale
• Strength of biomedical and bio-inspired materials
• John P. Hirth Honorary Symposia
• Hael Mughrabi Honorary Symposia
• Emerging topics

Confirmed Plenary Speakers Include:

Easo George, USA
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Mechanical Properties of High-Entropy Alloys – Review of Recent Developments

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Considerable progress has been made, especially during the past five years, in advancing our basic understanding of the mechanical properties of high-entropy alloys. Strength, ductility and toughness are among the most important mechanical properties and, in this talk, I will review some of their salient features including dependence on temperature, strain rate, and chemical composition. I will show that investigations by a number of different groups of microstructure-property relationships in a few carefully processed model alloys have uncovered some of the fundamental physical mechanisms that govern macroscopic flow and fracture behavior. Certain hypotheses, for example, that greater the number of constituent elements in high-entropy alloys, greater the degree of solid solution strengthening, have been falsified by experiments. Others, for example, that alloying elements that promote phase instabilities can also promote twinning/transformation induced plasticity, appear to hold great promise. After reviewing the progress made to date, I will briefly mention some fruitful areas for future research. Research supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division.

Dierk Raabe, EU
Max-Planck-Institut
Advancing Alloys by Segregation Engineering

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Internal interfaces and dislocations influence mechanical, functional, and kinetic properties of metallic alloys. They can be manipulated via solute decoration, local decomposition and confined transformation phenomena enabling changes in energy, mobility, structure, and cohesion. In an approach referred to as 'segregation engineering' solute decoration is not regarded as an undesired phenomenon but is instead utilized to manipulate specific interface and dislocation structures, compositions and properties that enable useful material behavior.

Ke Lu, China
Institute of Metal Research, CAS
Hardening and Softening in Nano-grained Metals

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Conventional metals become harder with decreasing grain sizes, following the classical Hall-Petch relationship. However, this relationship fails and softening occurs at grain sizes in the nanometer regime for some alloys. In this talk, grain size effect on plastic deformation mechanism of nano-grained metals will be analyzed for understanding the hardening and softening behaviors. Nano-grained pure metals and alloys with grain sizes ranging from few nanometers to submicrometers prepared by means of plastic deformation or electro-deposition are investigated. By changing grain boundary (GB) stability with relaxation or segregation of solute atoms, different plastic deformation mechanisms were identified over the grain size range studied, leading to either hardening or softening. The results revealed that GB stability provides an alternative dimension, in addition to grain size, for tailoring strength of nano-grained metals.

Erica Lilleodden, EU
Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht
Achieving Extraordinary Strengths by Varying Length Scales and Boundary Conditions

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While implicit size effects in mechanical behavior are well known to materials scientists, as exemplified in the equations relating yield strength to grain size or dislocation spacing, the mechanical response of materials is typically modeled as a continuum, with the inherent microstructural heterogeneities smeared out into an effective homogeneous structure. Yet the strength of metals – a marvelously tailorable “property” – relies on the introduction of microstructural constituents of varying dimensions and spacings, and most importantly the distribution of dislocations as both carriers of and barriers to plastic flow. In this presentation we will draw upon results from micromechanical experiments, where deformation is localized and boundary conditions can be tailored to address both finite size effects as well as the transition to continuum behavior, in order to explore how the fundamental characteristics of metal plasticity can be exploited in small dimensions to achieve extreme strengths, and whether such an approach can be useful in real structures.

Laurence Brassart, Australia
Monash University
Micromechanics of Highly Cross-linked Thermosets

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Highly-crosslinked epoxies are widely used as matrix material in high-performance fibre-reinforced composites, governing several aspects of their behaviour. Yet, attempts to model their viscoplastic response have been limited, as compared to thermoplastic polymers. However, the viscoplastic response of highly cross-linked thermosets, in particular under compression, is very similar to glassy thermoplastics below their glass-transition temperature, exhibiting complex features such as strain- and temperature-sensitivity, post-yield softening followed by rehardening, and severe non-linearity upon unloading. These phenomena can in principle be captured by advanced constitutive models for glassy polymers mixing phenomenological and micromechanical elements. However, this often comes at the price of a very large number of parameters (sometimes more than 30), while the physical basis of such models remains limited. In this work, we develop a micromechanical model to describe and predict the viscoplastic behaviour of the RTM6 epoxy resin. The model relies on the concept of STZ’s (Shear Transformation Zones) as the elementary carriers of plasticity, whose activation is sensitive to the local stress, temperature and microstructural state. STZ’s interact through the (possibly polarized) elastic stress field, resulting in overall viscoplastic flow. This model involves only 5 parameters to identify, all with a physical meaning. It is rich enough to quantitatively capture all the experimental trends, even the complex rate-reversal phenomenon observed during creep tests performed after plastic deformation at intermediate stress levels. While such a model cannot replace closed-form constitutive models for the treatment of large-scale components, it provides physical insights into the small-scale mechanics and is also useful to identify the parameters in macroscopic models.

Kaneaki Tsuzaki, Japan
Kyushu University
Metallurgical Aspects of Fatigue Crack Growth Resistance in Steel: How Can We Improve it through Microstructure Control?

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Fatigue failures create enormous risks for all engineered structures and human lives, motivating a large number of safety factors in design and inefficient use of resources. To increase the fatigue strength of steel – the most common ductile structural metal – it is important to consider the growth of microstructurally small cracks from three perspectives. First, the fatigue limit does not correspond to the critical stress for crack initiation but rather that for crack propagation. Namely, non-propagating fatigue cracks can exist at the fatigue limit after more than 10 million cycles. Second, the bulk of fatigue life is mostly in the small crack growth stage. Third, the growth of small cracks within steels can be controlled by designing the microstructure and plasticity. Three factors are considered when discussing crack growth behavior in a ductile metal during one loading cycle at a given stress amplitude: (1) crack-tip-deformation mechanisms; (2) plastic deformation around the crack tip; and (3) internal stress evolution in the crack tip and wake. In most metals and alloys, dislocation emission at the crack tip is responsible for crack tip opening and namely crack growth. Thus, we can suppress the crack growth rate by repressing dislocation slip in the region of the crack tip. Regarding internal stress evolution, the formation of compressive stress can suppress crack opening.This presentation introduces some of our recent examples of microstructure control in the vicinity of the crack tip to improve the fatigue crack growth resistance in steels; these include (a) strain-age hardening through dislocations and interstitial carbon atoms interaction in an Fe–C binary steel; (b) nitrogen-enhanced dislocation planarity in a nitrogen-added stainless steel; and (c) martensitic transformation with volume expansion in a TRIP maraging steel.

Dorte Juul-Jensen, EU
Technical University of Denmark
Metal Microstructures and Properties in 3D and 4D

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Whereas most microstructural characterization techniques reveal the microstructure of prepared sample surface or of thin sample sections – i.e. largely give a 2D description, mechanical properties are mostly measured for bulk 3D samples of various sizes. In this presentation, focus is on the potentials of synchrotron X-ray imaging techniques for mapping metal microstructures non-destructively in 3D and thus also allows the microstructural evolution to be followed over time, when the sample is loaded mechanically or thermally. Several of the synchrotron X-ray techniques furthermore have potentials for non-destructive mapping of local residual strains in 3D, i.e. the strain may be determined in selected local positions and followed during loading. The potentials of the techniques will be illustrated by examples including: -- Grain growth in Si steel showing the effects of grain boundary plane normal and misorientation on successful growth of Goss oriented grains -- Recrystallization of Al showing the effects of the local microstructural variations in the deformed matrix, including ‘hot spots’, for both nucleation and boundary migration -- Residual strain distribution in ductile cast iron showing the effects of casting method and graphite nodule size on the strain build-up near the nodules. As the final part of the presentation, the possibilities of transferring some of the 3D/4D synchrotron techniques to the home laboratories are discussed.

Carolin Koerner, EU
University of Erlangen
Evolution of Microstructure and Material Properties during Additive Manufacturing

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During the last years, digital manufacturing of metallic components directly from electronic data based on layer-by-layer fabrication has developed from rapid prototyping to additive manufacturing (AM). In contrast to conventional fabrication technologies, AM offers much more design freedom. Essential for the now starting success of powder bed based AM of metallic components are the attainable material properties. Nowadays, a variety of metallic alloys and high-performance materials can be successfully processed with material properties comparable to those reached in conventional processes such as casting or forming. Nevertheless, the layer-by-layer AM process leads to specific AM microstructures and properties due to rapid and directed solidification, epitaxial growth, in situ heat treatment or selective evaporation of volatile elements. Thus, knowledge based AM process strategies are essential in order to control the properties of AM materials. In return, this knowledge will allow us to adjust locally material properties within AM components. Based on numerical simulation and experimental results, microstructure evolution during layer-by-layer AM is considered in detail. The focus will be on building defects, grain structure and texture evolution, solidification microstructure and composition variations. These aspects and their effect on the resulting material properties are discussed for two high performance alloys, the nickel base alloy CMSX-4 and Ti-45Al-4Nb-0.4C.

Local Organizing Committee:

• Peter Anderson, The Ohio State University
• Irene Beyerlein, University of California, Santa Barbara
• James Earthman, University of California, Irvine
• Michael Mills, The Ohio State University
• Timothy Rupert, University of California, Irvine
• Izabela Szlufarska, University of Wisconsin

International Scientific Committee:

• Helena Van Swygenhoven, Switzerland - CHAIR
• Angus Wilkinson, UK - VICE CHAIR
• Irene Beyerlein, USA
• Cate Brinson, USA
• Atul Chokshi, India
• Antonin Dlouhy, Czech Republic
• Chris Hutchinson, Australia
• Yuichi Ikuhara, Japan
• Martin Heilmeier, Germany
• Marc Legros, France
• Michael Mills, USA
• Wolfgang Pantleon, Denmark
• Maria-Teresa Perez-Prado, Spain
• Reinhard Pippan, Austria
• Tresa Pollock, USA
• Alexei Romanov, Russia
• Chad Sinclair, Canada
• Werner Skrotzki, Germany
• Zhefang Zhang, China

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