Overview: Environmentally-Assisted Cracking (EAC) of engineering materials has been known for at least a half century. The sensitivity of engineering alloys to environmental exposure is well known from an engineering perspective. What is not known with certainty at this stage are the mechanisms of initiation and propagation by which the many manifestations of EAC occur. This understanding is fundamental to the development of strategies for control and prediction of EAC failures and is of great importance to the failure communities.

While significant progress in our understanding of EAC has been achieved in recent years, important fundamental questions remain on both its initiation and propagation. For instance, the questions “how does the environment influence the crack driving force,” and “why do ordinarily ductile materials fail in a brittle manner when exposed to certain environments” remain unanswered.

Our objective is to congregate a group of “skilled in the field” researchers in metallic materials for a workshop style that will endeavor to help clarify our current understanding of EAC and identify approaches to improve the current semi-quantitative understanding of the mechanisms.

The emphasis of the papers will be on:

systematic evaluation of the governing interacting parameters for crack initiation and propagation, including the roles of the local alloy microstructure, local crack morphology/branching, local environmental conditions within cracks and the local mechanical driving forces. • papers including experimental data for crack initiation and/or growth and those exploring unifying principles governing these time-static/cyclic stress dependent crack growth phenomena are particularly welcome;
new techniques for measuring crack initiation in aqueous environments;
the emphasis is on understanding and quantifying, rather than reporting the data of some material response;
all topics are to be at ambient temperatures.
Scope: The scope of this symposium includes the fundamental understanding of EAC from the initiation stage to growth and final failure in engineering alloys.

Emphasis of papers will be on the systematic evaluation of mapping governing parameters, such as thresholds stress intensity factors, crack growth rates, and steady state behavior. Papers dealing with unifying principles governing the time-stress dependent crack growth phenomena are particularly welcome.

Papers that are related to composite materials are discouraged.

Technical Topics:

Systematic variation of threshold KIscc and steady state (da/dt) in aqueous and gaseous environments
Role of damage under static load and fatigue loads in inert and in chemical envronments
Role of internal/external hydrogen on threshold K and crack growth
High resolution evaluation (ideally 3D) of Crack tip local conditions: mechanical driving-forces, alloy microstructure and environmemtal conditions
Modeling of the governing mechanisms-atomistic & continuum
The convergence of simulation and modeling with modern analytical tools

Conference Chairs:
A.K. Vasudevan, ONR (retired)
Ronald M. Latanision, Exponent, Inc.
N. J. Henry Holroyd, Luxfer

Abstract Submission
One-page abstracts that include specific results and conclusions to allow a scientific assessment of a proposed oral presentation or poster are invited.

Oral and poster abstract deadline: April 8, 2018

Abstracts should be submitted electronically at

https://ssl.linklings.net/conferences/structuralmaterials/

The abstract template available at the above link must be followed for an abstract to be considered for presentation.

There will be poster awards for best poster submitted by graduate students.