Lecture

Composite Materials: Toughness and Fracture Mechanisms

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In course

MSE-234: Mechanical behaviour of materials

Ce cours est une introduction au comportement mécanique, à l'élaboration, à la structure et au cycle de vie des grandes classes de matériaux de structure (métaux, polymères, céramiques et composites) ...

Description

This lecture explores the toughness and fracture mechanisms of composite materials, focusing on how cracks propagate and the energy consumed during the process. The instructor discusses the importance of fiber orientation, interface strength, and the bipartition mechanism in enhancing the toughness of composites. The lecture also covers the concept of porosity in materials, its effects on mechanical properties, and the deformation behavior under compression. Examples of porous materials like wood are provided to illustrate these concepts.

Instructors (3)

Andreas Mortensen

Andreas Mortensen is currently Professor and Director of the Institute of Materials at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory for Mechanical Metallurgy. He joined the faculty of EPFL 1997 after ten years, from 1986 to 1996, as a member of the faculty of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he held the successive titles of ALCOA Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. His research is focussed on the processing, microstructural development and mechanical behavior of advanced metallic materials with particular focus on metal matrix composites and metal foams, on infiltration processing and capillarity, and on damage and fracture in metallic materials. He is author or co-author of two monographs, around one hundred and eighty scientific or technical publications and twelve patents. Born in San Francisco in 1957, of dual (Danish and US) nationality, Andreas Mortensen graduated in 1980 from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris with a Diplôme dIngénieur Civil, and earned his Ph.D. in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 1986. Besides his academic employment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Nippon Steel during part of 1986, and was invited professor at the Ecole des Mines in Paris during the academic year 1995 to 1996. He is a member of the editorial committee of International Materials Reviews and has co-edited four books. He is a Fellow of ASM, a recipient of the Howe Medal and the Grossman Award of the American Society of Metals, was awarded the Péchiney Prize by the French Academy of Sciences and the Res Metallica Chair from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, received three EPFL teaching awards, is one of ISIs Highly Cited authors for Materials Science since 2002 and was awarded an ERC advanced grant in 2012.

David Hernandez Escobar

Expertise Physical metallurgy, ceramics, micro-mechanical testing Education Ph.D. Materials Science and Engineering | 2016 – 2021 Michigan State University B.S. Materials Engineering | 2012 – 2016 Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Julie Nathalie S Gheysen

Professionals experiences PhD student 2018–2022 Université Catholique de Louvain Teaching & PhD Courses Materials MSE-171 Introduction course of material science applied to usual building materials, especially concrete and metals. Description of their fabrication, mechanical and thermal properties and use in construction. Mechanical behaviour of materials MSE-234 This course provides an introduction to the mechanical behaviour, the processing, the structure and life-cycle o

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Related concepts (19)

Data compression

In information theory, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Any particular compression is either lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy. No information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information.

Deformation (engineering)

In engineering, deformation refers to the change in size or shape of an object. Displacements are the absolute change in position of a point on the object. Deflection is the relative change in external displacements on an object. Strain is the relative internal change in shape of an infinitesimally small cube of material and can be expressed as a non-dimensional change in length or angle of distortion of the cube. Strains are related to the forces acting on the cube, which are known as stress, by a stress-strain curve.

Deformation (physics)

In physics and continuum mechanics, deformation is the transformation of a body from a reference configuration to a current configuration. A configuration is a set containing the positions of all particles of the body. A deformation can occur because of external loads, intrinsic activity (e.g. muscle contraction), body forces (such as gravity or electromagnetic forces), or changes in temperature, moisture content, or chemical reactions, etc. Strain is related to deformation in terms of relative displacement of particles in the body that excludes rigid-body motions.

Lossless compression

Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy. By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates (and therefore reduced media sizes).

Lossy compression

In information technology, lossy compression or irreversible compression is the class of data compression methods that uses inexact approximations and partial data discarding to represent the content. These techniques are used to reduce data size for storing, handling, and transmitting content. The different versions of the photo of the cat on this page show how higher degrees of approximation create coarser images as more details are removed. This is opposed to lossless data compression (reversible data compression) which does not degrade the data.

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