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Goals and research questions
Goals
The main quantitative goals of the Centre are as follows:
Industrial:
1) To develop methods and tools for credible
advanced structural analysis at the user partners. 2) To ensure
transfer of technology across business sectors. 3) To arrange
courses and case study seminars at the user partners. 4) To
facilitate concurrent research projects with the user partners.
5) To facilitate employment of post docs, MSc and PhD
candidates at the user partners to strengthen the industrial
implementation.
Academic:
1) To graduate 20 PhD candidates and employ 5
post docs. 2) To graduate 100-150 MSc students. 3) To attract
10 foreign professors/scientists to the Centre. 4) To publish
100-150 papers in international peer-reviewed journals in
addition to conference papers. 5) To arrange two international
conferences.
Media:
1) To implement a strategy for popular science
presentations of the research activities in magazines,
newspapers, on television, radio and the web. 2) To establish
a media strategy where the female researchers are made
particularly visible in order to recruit female PhDs and post
docs and contribute to a more even gender balance in this
research field.
Research questions
Discussions with the partners have revealed that more
extensive use of advanced numerical simulations will
improve their competiveness in making cost-effective, safe
and environmentally friendly structures and products. This
industrial need is the basis for the three research questions
defined as the point-of-departure for the research activities
in CASA. The research questions encompass the entire first
five-year period as well as the potential subsequent three-year
period of the Centre, but additional research questions may
emerge in the later phases of the SFI.
RQ1:
How can we establish accurate, efficient and robust
constitutive models based on the chemical composition,
microstructure and thermo-mechanical processing of a
material?
RQ2:
How can we apply knowledge of material, geometry
and joining technology to obtain optimal behaviour of hybrid
structures for given load situations?
RQ3:
How can we describe the interaction between the load and
the deformable structure under extreme loading scenarios?
Motivated by these research questions, five basic research
programmes are defined in order to increase the prediction
accuracy of numerical simulations.
Lower Scale:
This programme concentrates on the lower
length scales of materials, from atomic up to the micrometre
scale, and will provide experimental and modelling input to the
multi-scale framework from the lower scale.
Metallic Materials:
This will develop a physically based and
experimentally validated multi-scale framework providing
constitutive models for crystal plasticity, continuum plasticity,
damage and fracture of metallic materials. The main
emphasis will be on aluminium alloys and steels. In many
critical structural applications, material properties beyond
standard testing conditions are required; hence high and low
temperatures, high pressures (from blast waves or water
depths) and elevated rates of strain (including shock loading)
will be given special attention.
Polymeric Materials:
This will develop and improve material
models representing the thermo-mechanical response up to
fracture for polymers, i.e. thermoplastics with or without fibre
reinforcement and elastomers. The models will be developed
for application in an industrial context. Particular attention is
paid to validation and efficient identification of the parameters
involved in the models.
Structural Joints:
This will provide validated computational
models for multi-material joints applicable in large-scale
finite element analyses. The scope is limited to the behaviour
and modelling of structural joints made with screws, adhesive
bonding and self-piercing rivets - as well as possible
combinations of these. The considered materials are steel,
aluminium and reinforced polymers.
Protective Structures:
This will develop advanced
computational tools and establish validated modelling
guidelines for computer-aided design of safer and more
cost- effective protective structures. Another objective will
be to replace phenomenological models with physical models
in a top-down/bottom-up multi-scale modelling approach in
order to reduce the number of mechanical tests as much as
possible in the design phase. The emphasis in this research
programme will not be on traditional fortification installations,
but on innovative lightweight and hybrid protective structures
to meet the future needs of the user partners. Actual materials
are those typically used in protective structures such as steel,
aluminium, polymers, glass, foams, ceramics and concrete.
Goals and research plan