Fracture Fatigue And Structural Integrity Of Metallic Materials

Fracture, fatigue, and other subcritical processes, such as creep crack growth or stress corrosion cracking, present numerous open issues from both scientific and industrial points of view. These phenomena are of special interest in industrial and civil metallic structures, such as pipes, vessels, machinery, aircrafts, ship hulls, and bridges, given that their failure may imply catastrophic consequences for human life, the natural environment, and/or the economy. Moreover, an adequate management of their operational life, defining suitable inspection periods, repairs, or replacements, requires their safety or unsafety conditions to be defined. The analysis of these technological challenges requires accurate comprehensive assessment tools based on solid theoretical foundations as well as structural integrity assessment standards or procedures incorporating such tools into industrial practice. This volume is focused on new advances in fracture, fatigue, and structural integrity of metallic structural components containing defects (e.g., cracks, notches, metal loss, etc.), and also on those developments that are being or could be incorporated into structural integrity assessment procedures, such as BS7910, R6, or API 579-1/ASME FFS-1.

Fracture, fatigue, and other subcritical processes, such as creep crack growth or stress corrosion cracking, present numerous open issues from both scientific and industrial points of view. These phenomena are of special interest in industrial and civil metallic structures, such as pipes, vessels, machinery, aircrafts, ship hulls, and bridges, given that their failure may imply catastrophic consequences for human life, the natural environment, and/or the economy. Moreover, an adequate management of their operational life, defining suitable inspection periods, repairs, or replacements, requires their safety or unsafety conditions to be defined. The analysis of these technological challenges requires accurate comprehensive assessment tools based on solid theoretical foundations as well as structural integrity assessment standards or procedures incorporating such tools into industrial practice.

Most metallic components and structures are subjected, in service, to random or variable amplitude loadings. There are many examples: vehicles subjected to loadings and vibrations caused by road irregularity and engine, structures exposed to wind, off-shore platforms undergoing wave-loadings, and so on. Just like constant amplitude loadings, random and variable amplitude loadings can make fatigue cracks initiate and propagate, even up to catastrophic failures. Engineers faced with the problem of estimating the structural integrity and the fatigue strength of metallic structures, or their propensity to fracture, usually make use of theoretical, numerical, or experimental approaches. This reprint collects a series of recent scientific contributions aimed at providing an up-to-date overview of approaches and case studies-theoretical, numerical or experimental-on several topics in the field of fracture, fatigue strength, and the structural integrity of metallic components subjected to random or variable amplitude loadings.

The mechanics of fracture and fatigue have produced a huge body of research work in relation to applications to metal materials and structures. However, a variety of non-metallic materials (e.g., concrete and cementitious composites, rocks, glass, ceramics, bituminous mixtures, composites, polymers, rubber and soft matter, bones and biological materials, and advanced and multifunctional materials) have received relatively less attention, despite their attractiveness for a large spectrum of applications related to the components and structures of diverse engineering branches, applied sciences and architecture, and to the load-carrying systems of biological organisms. This book covers the broad topic of structural integrity of non-metallic materials, considering the modelling, assessment, and reliability of structural elements of any scale. Original contributions from engineers, mechanical materials scientists, computer scientists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians are presented, applying both experimental and theoretical approaches.

This book presents selected contributions from ICMFM XX and the Polish National Conference—KKMP. The XX International Colloquium on Mechanical Fatigue of Metals (ICMFM XX) was organized on 15–17 September 2021, in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, in Wrocław City, Poland, in a remote form. Its aim was to facilitate and encourage the exchange of knowledge and experiences among the different communities involved in both basic and applied research in the field of fatigue of metals, looking at the problem of fatigue from a multiscale perspective, and exploring analytical and numerical simulative approaches, without losing the perspectives of the application. The Polish National Conference—KKMP 2021—was organized remotely with 50–80 prominent international participants from the fracture mechanics community.

The accumulation of damage and the development of fatigue cracks under the influence of loads is a common phenomenon that occurs in metals. To slow down crack growth and ensure an adequate level of safety and the optimal durability of structural elements, experimental tests and simulations are required to determine the influence of various factors. Such factors include, among others, the impact of microstructures, voids, notches, the environment, etc. Research carried out in this field and the results obtained are necessary to guide development toward the receipt of new and advanced materials that meet the requirements of the designers. This Special Issue aims to provide the data, models and tools necessary to provide structural integrity and perform lifetime prediction based on the stress (strain) state and, finally, the increase in fatigue cracks in the material.

The mechanics of fracture and fatigue have produced a huge body of research work in relation to applications to metal materials and structures. However, a variety of non-metallic materials (e.g., concrete and cementitious composites, rocks, glass, ceramics, bituminous mixtures, composites, polymers, rubber and soft matter, bones and biological materials, and advanced and multifunctional materials) have received relatively less attention, despite their attractiveness for a large spectrum of applications related to the components and structures of diverse engineering branches, applied sciences and architecture, and to the load-carrying systems of biological organisms. This book covers the broad topic of structural integrity of non-metallic materials, considering the modelling, assessment, and reliability of structural elements of any scale. Original contributions from engineers, mechanical materials scientists, computer scientists, physicists, chemists, and mathematicians are presented, applying both experimental and theoretical approaches.

What can be added to the fracture mechanics of metal fatigue that has not already been said since the 1900s? From the view point of the material and structure engineer, there are many aspects of failure by fatigue that are in need of attention, particularly when the size and time of the working components are changed by orders of magnitude from those considered by st traditional means. The 21 century marks an era of technology transition where structures are made larger and devices are made smaller, rendering the method of destructive testing unpractical. While health monitoring entered the field of science and engineering, the practitioners are discovering that the correlation between the signal and the location of interest depends on a priori knowledge of where failure may initiate. This information is not easy to find because the integrity of the physical system will change with time. Required is software that can self-adjust in time according to the monitored data. In this connection, effective application of health monitoring can use a predictive model of fatigue crack growth. Earlier fatigue crack growth models assumed functional dependence on the maximum stress and the size of the pre-existing crack or defect. Various possibilities were examined in the hope that the data could be grouped such that linear interpolation would apply.