CD Laboratory for Digital material design guidelines for mitigation of alloy embrittlement

This CD Laboratory focuses on the embrittlement of engineering and functional materials, as well as methods for predicting and avoiding it.

The higher the toughness of a material, the better it resists fracture and crack propagation. Similarly, higher ductility enhances its resistance to failure by means of plastic deformation. Both of these properties are crucial in controlling the risk of material failure during both production and operation of structural and functional materials, making them essential in a wide range of applications.

The challenge here is that many known embrittlement phenomena that reduce the ductility and toughness of metallic alloys like steels or Ni-base alloys (and can make them unusable in the worst case), act on different length and time scales. This often results in a mostly qualitative understanding, rather than a comprehensive and universal multiscale approach that includes all these phenomena and ex-plains how they are related to one another.

This again makes it difficult to predict the properties of materials – especially when it comes to de-veloping new materials, where assessments of their ductility and toughness can only be made to-wards the end of the development cycle. However, rapid and reliable predictions of the toughness and ductility of new materials are essential for enabling technologies for the energy transition: They play a central role, particularly in the context of the climate crisis and global economic challenges, which demand rapid improvements to existing and the development of new, ‘green’ materials.

This new CD Laboratory has therefore set itself the goal of developing a comprehensive understand-ing of the fundamental principles of these embrittlement phenomena using a computer-aided ap-proach, validated and supplemented by high-resolution experimental methods. This approach should enable the targeted application of strategies to enhance desired properties, thereby creating more reliable materials.

On the one hand, these research results will enable the enhancement of existing materials and their adaptation to new requirements with regard to damage tolerance. On the other hand, this fundamental knowledge, in combination with the developed computational tools, will significantly accelerate the development cycle of new materials via digitalization. Particularly in the context of a sustainable circular economy, this accelerated development of ‘green’ construction and functional materials will make an important contribution to the energy transition.