Integrity of Materials and Structures
In the Department of Ferrous Metallurgy, the group for integrity of materials and structures under Professor Sebastian Münstermann's guidance is active in teaching and in the research of application of metallic materials. The classes we offer are taught on a scientific and application-oriented level. Our research projects are both, based on the fundamentals and relevant for real-life problems. The projects concern current questions and thus, contribute scientifically to solving actual problems in the industry.
Key Research Areas
A) Structural Integrity
The sustainable use of natural resources is based on the full exploitation of mechanical properties of structural materials. Thus, the group for structural integrity develops and applies concepts for the safety assessment of components which are based on damage mechanics approaches. For applications from civil and mechanical engineering, the concepts aim towards improved limit states analysis in order to allow for an optimized exploitation of mechanical property profiles.
B) Lifetime Assessment
The majority of the engineering failure cases results from fatigue phenomena. In order to avoid these catastrophic failures, the group for lifetime assessment provides reliable concepts to estimate the components´ lifetimes. Most of the projects focus on the development of concepts for the prediction of short fatigue crack growth.
C) Component Testing
For the modelling of damage and fracture, scalebridging by homogenization methods from the μm- to the mm- and the m-scale is an important issue. Especially when the concepts shall serve for the safety assessment of components, the experimental validation of model predictions is indispensable. Therefore the group for component testing applies experimental techniques on the component scale, with the possibility to perform fatigue experiments at reasonable testing frequencies.
D) Damage tolerance
Modern material design is based on the design of optimized microstructures for precisely pre-defined applications. The group for damage tolerance develops and applies computer simulation strategies in order to translate property requirements determined on the component scale into tailored microstructure configurations.