ToughSteel partners from the UCLouvain organised on February 10th the industrial workshop “How to assess the essential work of fracture: set up and carry out an experimental campaign”, addressed to stakeholders from the steel industry sector to disseminate the benefits and opportunities that fracture toughness brings for understanding cracking problems.
The workshop, aimed at implementing and optimising an experimental Essential Work of Fracture (EWF) campaign, started with a presentation from David Frómeta, project coordinator of the ToughSteel project and researcher at Eurecat’s Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit. During his presentation, Frómeta introduced key topics regarding the EWF methodology, like the ligament yielding or the influence of the notch preparation method.
Antoine Hilhorst, researcher at UCLouvain, continued presenting statistical aspects of the EWF method. The objective of the presentation was to use statistics to reduce the amount of material or sample needed compared to a classical campaign and improve the regression analysis of the result to reduce the statistical error on the extracted EWF value. The new distribution of ligament length combined with the new analysis is able to achieve the same precision on the EWF value while reducing by a factor of two the material needed compared to a classical campaign.
The event followed with Pierre Bollen, researcher at UCLouvain, providing a general overview of the ToughSteel project. On the other hand, Thibault Heremans, researcher at UCLouvain, defined in his presentation the experimental aspects that need to be considered in a campaign, from the choice of the notch radius and the machining techniques associated, to performing mechanical tests and analysing the resulting data with the new analysis presented by Hilhorst.
You can retrieve the full recording of this workshop down below:
