Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

In high technology industries, like aerospace and power industries, efficient designs tools are as important as the materials performance themselves for triggering innovations. These industries cycles are such that new designs can only be tested a limited number of times before being produced. Therefore, engineers rely on over-conservative safety factors to ensure that their designs meet the certification requirements in the first attempt. These safety, or ignorance, factors are used to compensate the lack of knowledge and accuracy in the predictive models currently used. This lack of performance results from the fact that most predictive models rely on macroscopic quantities, like stresses and strains, whereas failure is a multiscale process that originates at the nanoscopic scale and propagates through the hierarchy of scales up to failure. We believe that rather than eluding it through simple models, we must embrace the full complexity of materials failure by understanding, quantifying, predicting and linking its various mechanisms, at every relevant length scale. This is the very ambitious research program to be supported by this application.To reach our goal, we must have access to stress and strain fields at the scale of the micrometer in order to understand how materials deform and break. The requested equipment is a long distance stereo-microscope combined with a commercially available Digital Image Correlation software that allows for measuring strains in more that 1,000,000 points by taking two pictures under unloaded and loaded conditions. Such rich information, at the scale of a few micrometers, will be used to develop and obtain the numerical values for the parameters predicting the deformation and failure of advanced materials. The outcome of that research will be more accurate models that will lead to lighter and safer parts requiring less maintenance to ensure safety. This research will impact both the aerospace and power industries.