Nanomechanical Testing Journal Club
We regularly come across interesting and informative materials research articles. Members of our Nanomechanical Testing Journal Club receive brief reviews of select papers and direct links to the full article. Our Journal Club is meant to be a helpful tool that keeps you up-to-date on the newest in Nanomechanical Testing research and to assist you in discovering articles you may have missed.
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Featured Journal Club Article:
Quantifying Physical Parameters to Predict Brittle/Ductile Behavior
Brittle-to-ductile transitions not only represent an important phenomenon in the failure of materials, but are also an excellent opportunity to study the fundamental competition between fracture and plasticity as routes to dissipate mechanical energy. This subject has rightly garnered a lot of attention through many decades of materials science. However, the transition is a complex function of many variables, including strain rate, presence of defects and the state of the applied stress. One thing that has been lacking is a basic analytical model for predicting the transition point based upon real materials properties. That is the goal of a recent work from researchers at the University of Minnesota.
The authors' observations of fracture in silicon microbeams and post-mortem TEM giving evidence of crack tip plasticity helped to refine an analytical model that has been in development for many years. Crack tip shielding plays a prominent role in the elevation of fracture toughness through the transition to ductility. This model was then applied both to silicon and tungsten data.
William W. Gerberich, Kevin M. Schmalbach, Youxing Chen, Eric Hintsala, Nathan A. Mara
Materials Science and Engineering: A,Volume 808, 18 March 2021, 140899
