CSULB Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Assistant Professor Yan Li has won a Best Paper Award for her research on materials properties.
The paper, “Probabilistic Fracture Toughness Prediction of Composite Materials,” was presented at the 8th International Conference on Computational Methods (ICCM2017) in Guilin, China, in July 2017.
It explores the challenge of predicting the variation of material properties such as strength and fracture toughness in material-sensitive design, and the development of an integrated computational and analytical model to predict fracture toughness in a statistical sense.
In the model, the Weibull distribution parameters are correlated with the statistical measures of microstructure characteristics and the statistical characterization of the competition between crack deflection and crack penetration at matrix/reinforcement interfaces. The approach and model will lead to more reliable material design through microstructure tailoring.
The paper is an outgrowth of research supported by a U.S. Army Research Lab grant. The objective of this research is to elucidate the competition between the deformation and failure mechanisms in Metal Matrix Composites.
ICCM provides an international forum for exchanging ideas in areas related to computational methods, numerical modelling, and simulation, as well as their applications in engineering and science.