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Don't read this
Don’t
READ
this
Not OK? Still reading? Well, don’t say you didn’t get warned!
Any further reading is at your own risk. So, here goes:
NOK 30 MILLION GRANT
SFI CASA Professors Odd Sture Hopperstad, Tore Børvik and
colleagues have just received a NOK 30 million grant to
investigate new ways of designing aluminium structures to
prevent failure. The title of the project is “Microstructure-
based Modelling of Ductile Fracture in Aluminium Alloys”,
abbreviated: “FractAl”.
“What we are aiming at is to enable the design of both the
material and structure in an optimal combination without
having to use time-consuming and expensive mechanical
tests,” Hopperstad and Børvik explain.
IN POPULAR WORDS
An attempt at a popularized explanation of their ambition might
go like this:
Imagine you understand better than anyone before you what
happens when aluminium breaks. Imagine you know the
properties of different alloys down to the nano level and how the
atoms react to different kinds of strain. Imagine you are able to
build models that identify the optimal combination of alloy and
structural components with much less testing than previously.
Then you will have saved a lot of money and laid the foundation
for vastly improved products and production processes.
ONLY THE BEST
Grants from the FRIPRO Toppforsk scheme from the Research
Council of Norway are highly prestigious and aim at world
leadership. In this case, it gives the core team of Hopperstad,
Børvik and Ole Runar Myhr from NTNU’s Structural Impact
Laboratory along with partners Ahmed Benallal from the
French university ENS Cachan and Jonas Faleskog from
the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden the opportunity
to “develop and validate a novel microstructure-based
modelling framework for ductile fracture in aluminium alloys
– thus reliably introducing multi-scale simulation in design of
aluminium design against failure”.
This is basic research with no strings attached. The five-year
project involves four PhD candidates and two post-docs and is
financed by the Research Council of Norway and NTNU. Start-
up is in August this year.
WIN-WIN
If there ever was a win-win situation, this is one. SFI CASA
stands to reap great benefits from the research. Where CASA is
a NOK 300 million eight-year programme working on structural
analysis of steel, aluminium, polymers and glass, Toppforsk
enables researchers to dedicate a concentrated effort in a
very specific area. The challenges of FractAl could have been
approached through CASA, but not to the same extent and in
such detail.
The outcome for CASA is a wide range of scientific findings that
will be made available to the partners by help of the SIMLab
Tool Box, where everything will be implemented. In this way,
NOK 30 million of research will give an important boost to the
rest of CASA’s activity.
Since this is basic research, the results will be published in
peer-reviewed journals and be made available to the public.
SAME PEOPLE ON SAB
The close relationship between the FractAl project and CASA
is underlined by the composition of the project’s Scientific
Advisory Board, consisting of CASA Director Magnus Langseth
and CASA Scientific Advisory Board members John Hutchinson
and David Embury.
“We are very happy to have them on board, both because of
their capacities and because their double position will help us
avoid overlapping work in the two programmes,” Hopperstad
and Børvik underline.
The international partners - Benallal and Faleskog - are leading
international researchers within their fields. While Benallal is a
long-standing professional companion, the collaboration with
Faleskog is more recent. The five researchers also complement
each other scale-wise, ranging from Myhr at nano level to
Børvik at the top.
HEADING FOR THE ERC
It is an explicit requirement for the Toppforsk grant that the
project will file an application for a grant from the European
Research Council (ERC). In the recent international evaluation
of Basic and Long-term Research in Engineering Science
in Norway, SIMLab received top score on scientific quality,
productivity, relevance and impact for society, illustrating the
group’s world-leading position.
So, when you are world-leading, where do you go? Triggered
by their faculty, Hopperstad, Børvik and colleagues decided to
go for a Toppforsk grant which will in turn direct them towards
the ERC.
Sometimes, uncovering the secrets of a very specific area of
research can bring the big picture significant steps ahead. The
topic for the project is an area where SIMLab is already world-
leading. FractAl aims at consolidating this position.
THANKS TO SIMLAB
Today, Odd Sture Hopperstad and Tore Børvik are Research
Director and Vice Director at SFI CASA, respectively. They
strongly emphasize that qualifying for the Toppforsk grant
would have been impossible without the foundation they have
been part of in the SIMLab research group.
There will be close interaction between the CASA and FractAl
programmes which was an important feature that was stressed
in the application for the Toppforsk grant.
Really, you shouldn’t. It doesn’t belong here. It’s not about CASA.
It didn’t even take place last year. OK?