Tag Archives: innovation

Crack tip plasticity in reactor steels

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Amplitude of temperature in steel due to a cyclic load with a crack growing from left to right along the horizontal centre line with the stress concentration at its tip exhibiting the peak values. The wedge shapes in the left corners are part of the system.

At this time of year the flow into my inbox is augmented daily by prospective PhD students sending me long emails describing how their skills, qualifications and interests perfectly match the needs of my research group, or sometimes someone else’s group if they have not been careful in setting up their mass mailing.  At the moment, I have four PhD projects for which I am looking for outstanding students; so, because it will help prospective students and might interest my other readers but also because I am short of ideas for the blog, I plan to describe one project per week for the next month.

The first project is about the effect of hydrogen on crack tip plasticity in reactor steels.  Fatigue cracks grow in steels by coalescing imperfections in the microstructure of the material until small voids are formed in areas of high stress.  When these voids connect together a crack is formed.  Repeated loading and unloading of the material provides the energy to move the imperfections, known as dislocations, and geometric features in structures are stress concentrators which focus this energy causing cracks to be formed in their vicinity.  The movement of dislocations causes permanent, or plastic deformation of the material.  The sharp geometry of a crack tip becomes a stress concentrator creating a plastic zone in which dislocations pile up and voids form allowing the crack to extend [see post on ‘Alan Arnold Griffith‘ on April 26th, 2017].  It is possible to detect the thermal energy released during plastic deformation using a technique known as thermoelastic stress analysis [see ‘Counting photons to measure stress‘ on November 18th 2015] as well as to measure the stress field associated with the propagating crack [1].  One of my current PhD students has been using this technique to investigate the effect of irradiation damage on the growth of cracks in stainless steel used in nuclear reactors.  We use an ion accelerator at the Dalton Cumbrian Facility to introduce radiation damage into specimens the size of a postage stamp and afterwards apply cyclic loads and watch the fatigue crack grow using our sensitive infra-red cameras.  We have found that the irradiation reduced the rate of crack growth and we will be publishing a paper on it shortly [and a PhD thesis].  In the new project, our industrial sponsors want us to explore the effect of hydrogen on crack growth in irradiated steel, because the presence of hydrogen is known to accelerate fatigue crack growth [2] which is believe to happen as a result of hydrogen atoms disrupting the formation of dislocations at the microscale and localising plasticity at crack tip on the mesoscale.  However, these ideas have not been demonstrated in experiments, so we plan to do this using thermoelastic stress analysis and to investigate the combined influence of hydrogen and irradiation by developing a process for pre-charging the steel specimens with hydrogen using an electrolytic cell and irradiating them using the ion accelerator.  Both hydrogen and radiation are present in a nuclear reactor and hence the results will be relevant to predicting the safe working life of nuclear reactors.

The PhD project is fully-funded for UK and EU citizens as part of a Centre for Doctoral Training and will involve a year of specialist training followed by three years of research.  For more information following this link.

References:

  1. Yang, Y., Crimp, M., Tomlinson, R.A., Patterson, E.A., 2012, Quantitative measurement of plastic strain field at a fatigue crack tip, Proc. R. Soc. A., 468(2144):2399-2415.
  2. Matsunaga, H., Takakuwa, O., Yamabe, J., & Matsuoka, S., 2017, Hydrogen-enhanced fatigue crack growth in steels and its frequency dependence. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 375(2098), 20160412

Finding DIMES

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ‘INSTRUCTIVE final reckoning’ (see post on January 9th).  INSTRUCTIVE was an EU project, which ended on December 31st, 2018  in which we demonstrated that infra-red cameras could be used to monitor the initiation and propagation of cracks in aircraft structures (see Middleton et al, 2019).  Now, we have seamlessly moved on to a new EU project, called DIMES (Development of Integrated MEasurement Systems), which started on January 1st, 2019.  To quote our EU documentation, the overall aim of DIMES is ‘to develop and demonstrate an automated measurement system that integrates a range of measurement approaches to enable damage and cracks to be detected and monitored as they originate at multi-material interfaces in an aircraft assembly’.  In simpler terms, we are going to take the results from the INSTRUCTIVE project, integrate them with other existing technologies for monitoring the structural health of an aircraft, and produce a system that can be installed in an aircraft fuselage and will provide early warning on the formation of cracks.  We have two years to achieve this target and demonstrate the system in a ground-based test on a real fuselage at an Airbus facility.  This was a scary prospect until we had our kick-off meeting and a follow-up brainstorming session a couple of weeks ago.  Now, it’s a little less scary.  If I have scared you with the prospect of cracks in aircraft, then do not be alarmed; we have been flying aircraft with cracks in them for years.  It is impossible to build an aircraft without cracks appearing, possibly during manufacturing and certainly in service – perfection (i.e. cracklessness) is unattainable and instead the stresses are maintained low enough to ensure undetected cracks will not grow (see ‘Alan Arnold Griffith’ on April 26th, 2017) and that detected ones are repaired before they propagate significantly (see ‘Aircraft inspection’ on October 10th, 2018).

I should explain that the ‘we’ above is the University of Liverpool and Strain Solutions Limited, who were the partners in INSTRUCTIVE, plus EMPA, the Swiss National Materials Laboratory, and Dantec Dynamics GmbH, a producer of scientific instruments in Ulm, Germany.  I am already working with these latter two organisations in the EU project MOTIVATE; so, we are a close-knit team who know and trust each other  – that’s one of the keys to successful collaborations tackling ambitious challenges with game-changing outcomes.

So how might the outcomes of DIMES be game-changing?  Well, at the moment, aircraft are designed using computer models that are comprehensively validated using measurement data from a large number of expensive experiments.  The MOTIVATE project is about reducing the number of experiments and increasing the quality and quantity of information gained from each experiment, i.e. ‘Getting Smarter’ (see post on June 21st 2017).  However, if the measurement system developed in DIMES allowed us to monitor in-flight strain fields in critical locations on-board an aircraft, then we would have high quality data to support future design work, which would allow further reductions in the campaign of experiments required to support new designs; and we would have continuous comprehensive monitoring of the structural integrity of every aircraft in the fleet, which would allow more efficient planning of maintenance as well as increased safety margins, or reductions in structural weight while maintaining safety margins.  This would be a significant step towards digital twins of aircraft (see ‘Fourth industrial revolution’ on July 4th, 2018 and ‘Can you trust your digital twin?’ on November 23rd, 2016).

The INSTRUCTIVE, MOTIVATE and DIMES projects have received funding from the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 685777, No. 754660 and No. 820951 respectively.

The opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the author’s view and the Clean Sky 2 Joint Undertaking is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Sources:

Middleton CA, Gaio A, Greene RJ & Patterson EA, Towards automated tracking of initiation and propagation of cracks in Aluminium alloy coupons using thermoelastic stress analysis, J. Non-destructive Testing, 38:18, 2019

 

INSTRUCTIVE final reckoning

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Our EU project, INSTRUCTIVE came to an end with the closing of 2018.  We have achieved all of our milestones and deliverables; and, now have 51 (=60-9) days to submit our final reports.  We have already presented the technical contents of those reports to representatives of our sponsors in a final review meeting just before the Christmas break.  I think that they were pleased with our progress; our findings certainly stimulated debate about how to move forward and implement the new technologies – lots of new questions that we did not know we should be asking when we started the project.

We are also disseminating the key results more publicly because this is an obligation inherent with receiving public funding for our research; but also, because I see no purpose in advancing knowledge without sharing it. During the course of the project we have given research updates at three conferences and the papers/abstracts for these are available via the University of Liverpool Repository [#1, #2 & #3].  And, we are in the process of producing three papers for publication in archived journals.

However, the real tangible benefit of the project is the move to next stage of development for the technology supported by a new project, called DIMES, that started on January 1st, 2019.  The aim of the DIMES project is to develop and demonstrate systems with the capability to detect a crack or delamination in a metallic or composite structure, and the potential to be deployed as part of an on-board structural health monitoring system for passenger aircraft.  In other words, the INSTRUCTIVE project has successfully demonstrated that a new philosophy for monitoring damage in aerospace structures, using disturbances to the strain field caused by the damage, is at least as effective as traditional non-destructive evaluation (NDE) techniques and in some circumstances provides much more sensitivity about the initiation and propagation of damage.  This has been sufficiently successful in the laboratory and on aircraft components in an industrial environment that is worth exploring its deployment for on-board monitoring and the first step is to use it in ground-based tests.

There will be more on DIMES as the project gets underway and updates on its progress will replace the twice-yearly ones on INSTRUCTIVE.

The series of posts on the INSTRUCTIVE project can be found at https://realizeengineering.blog/category/myresearch/instructive-project/

instructive acknowledgement

Industrial uncertainty

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Last month I spent almost a week in Zurich.  It is one of our favourite European cities [see ‘A reflection of existentialism‘ on December 20th, 2017]; however, on this occasion there was no time for sight-seeing because I was there for the mid-term meeting of the MOTIVATE project and to conduct some tests and demonstrations in the laboratories of our host, EMPA, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology.  Two of our project partners, Dantec Dynamics GmbH based in Ulm, Germany, and the Athena Research Centre in Patras, Greece, have developed methods for quantifying the uncertainty present in measurements of deformation made in an industrial environment using digital image correlation (DIC) [see ‘256 shades of grey‘ on January 22, 2014].  Digital image correlation is a technique in which we usually apply a random speckle pattern to the object which allows us to track the movement of the object surface over time by searching for the new position of the speckles in the photographs of the object.  If we use a pair of cameras in a stereoscopic arrangement, then we can measure in-plane and out-of-plane displacements.  Digital image correlation is a well-established measurement technique that has become ubiquitous in mechanics laboratories. In previous EU projects, we have developed technology for quantifying uncertainty in in-plane [SPOTS project] and out-of-plane [ADVISE project] measurements in a laboratory environment.  However, when you take the digital image correlation equipment into an industrial environment, for instance an aircraft hangar to make measurements during a full-scale test, then additional sources of uncertainty and error appear. The new technology demonstrated last month allows these additional uncertainties to be quantified.  As part of the MOTIVATE project, we will be involved in a full-scale test on a large section of an Airbus aircraft next year and so, we will be able to utilise the new technology for the first time.

The photograph shows preparations for the demonstrations in EMPA’s laboratories.  In the foreground is a stereoscopic digital image correlation system with which we are about to make measurements of deformation of a section of aircraft skin, supplied by Airbus, which has a speckle pattern on its surface and is about to be loaded in compression by the large servo-hydraulic test machine.

References:

From SPOTS project:

Patterson EA, Hack E, Brailly P, Burguete RL, Saleem Q, Seibert T, Tomlinson RA & Whelan M, Calibration and evaluation of optical systems for full-field strain measurement, Optics and Lasers in Engineering, 45(5):550-564, 2007.

Whelan MP, Albrecht D, Hack E & Patterson EA, Calibration of a speckle interferometry full-field strain measurement system, Strain, 44(2):180-190, 2008.

From ADVISE project:

Hack E, Lin X, Patterson EA & Sebastian CM, A reference material for establishing uncertainties in full-field displacement measurements, Measurement Science and Technology, 26:075004, 2015.