John M Emery

Bio: John M Emery is an academic researcher from Sandia National Laboratories. The author has contributed to research in topics: Plasticity & Residual stress. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 33 publications receiving 471 citations.

The Sandia Fracture Challenge: blind round robin predictions of ductile tearing

Abstract: Existing and emerging methods in computational mechanics are rarely validated against problems with an unknown outcome. For this reason, Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with US National Science Foundation and Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, launched a computational challenge in mid-summer, 2012. Researchers and engineers were invited to predict crack initiation and propagation in a simple but novel geometry fabricated from a common off-the-shelf commercial engineering alloy. The goal of this international Sandia Fracture Challenge was to benchmark the capabilities for the prediction of deformation and damage evolution associated with ductile tearing in structural metals, including physics models, computational methods, and numerical implementations currently available in the computational fracture community. Thirteen teams participated, reporting blind predictions for the outcome of the Challenge. The simulations and experiments were performed independently and kept confidential. The methods for fracture prediction taken by the thirteen teams ranged from very simple engineering calculations to complicated multiscale simulations. The wide variation in modeling results showed a striking lack of consistency across research groups in addressing problems of ductile fracture. While some methods were more successful than others, it is clear that the problem of ductile fracture prediction continues to be challenging. Specific areas of deficiency have been identified through this effort. Also, the effort has underscored the need for additional blind prediction-based assessments.

The Sandia Fracture Challenge: blind round robin predictions of ductile tearing

Abstract: Existing and emerging methods in computational mechanics are rarely validated against problems with an unknown outcome. For this reason, Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with US National Science Foundation and Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, launched a computational challenge in mid-summer, 2012. Researchers and engineers were invited to predict crack initiation and propagation in a simple but novel geometry fabricated from a common off-the-shelf commercial engineering alloy. The goal of this international Sandia Fracture Challenge was to benchmark the capabilities for the prediction of deformation and damage evolution associated with ductile tearing in structural metals, including physics models, computational methods, and numerical implementations currently available in the computational fracture community. Thirteen teams participated, reporting blind predictions for the outcome of the Challenge. The simulations and experiments were performed independently and kept confidential. The methods for fracture prediction taken by the thirteen teams ranged from very simple engineering calculations to complicated multiscale simulations. The wide variation in modeling results showed a striking lack of consistency across research groups in addressing problems of ductile fracture. While some methods were more successful than others, it is clear that the problem of ductile fracture prediction continues to be challenging. Specific areas of deficiency have been identified through this effort. Also, the effort has underscored the need for additional blind prediction-based assessments.

The third Sandia fracture challenge: predictions of ductile fracture in additively manufactured metal

Abstract: The Sandia Fracture Challenges provide a forum for the mechanics community to assess its ability to predict ductile fracture through a blind, round-robin format where mechanicians are challenged to predict the deformation and failure of an arbitrary geometry given experimental calibration data. The Third Challenge (SFC3) required participants to predict fracture in an additively manufactured (AM) 316L stainless steel bar containing through holes and internal cavities that could not have been conventionally machined. The volunteer participants were provided extensive data including tension and notched tensions tests of 316L specimens built on the same build-plate as the Challenge geometry, micro-CT scans of the Challenge specimens and geometric measurements of the feature based on the scans, electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) information on grain texture, and post-test fractography of the calibration specimens. Surprisingly, the global behavior of the SFC3 geometry specimens had modest variability despite being made of AM metal, with all of the SFC3 geometry specimens failing under the same failure mode. This is attributed to the large stress concentrations from the holes overwhelming the stochastic local influence of the AM voids and surface roughness. The teams were asked to predict a number of quantities of interest in the response based on global and local measures that were compared to experimental data, based partly on Digital Image Correlation (DIC) measurements of surface displacements and strains, including predictions of variability in the resulting fracture response, as the basis for assessment of the predictive capabilities of the modeling and simulation strategies. Twenty-one teams submitted predictions obtained from a variety of methods: the finite element method (FEM) or the mesh-free, peridynamic method; solvers with explicit time integration, implicit time integration, or quasi-statics; fracture methods including element deletion, peridynamics with bond damage, XFEM, damage (stiffness degradation), and adaptive remeshing. These predictions utilized many different material models: plasticity models including J2 plasticity or Hill yield with isotropic hardening, mixed Swift-Voce hardening, kinematic hardening, or custom hardening curves; fracture criteria including GTN model, Hosford-Coulomb, triaxiality-dependent strain, critical fracture energy, damage-based model, critical void volume fraction, and Johnson-Cook model; and damage evolution models including damage accumulation and evolution, crack band model, fracture energy, displacement value threshold, incremental stress triaxiality, Cocks-Ashby void growth, and void nucleation, growth, and coalescence. Teams used various combinations of calibration data from tensile specimens, the notched tensile specimens, and literature data. A detailed comparison of results based of these different methods is presented in this paper to suggest a set of best practices for modeling ductile fracture in situations like the SFC3 AM-material problem. All blind predictions identified the nominal crack path and initiation location correctly. The SFC3 participants generally fared better in their global predictions of deformation and failure than the participants in the previous Challenges, suggesting the relative maturity of the models used and adoption of best practices from previous Challenges. This paper provides detailed analyses of the results, including discussion of the utility of the provided data, challenges of the experimental-numerical comparison, defects in the AM material, and human factors.

Reengineering Aircraft Structural Life Prediction Using a Digital Twin

Abstract: Reengineering of the aircraft structural life prediction process to fully exploit advances in very high performance digital computing is proposed. The proposed process utilizes an ultrahigh fidelity model of individual aircraft by tail number, a Digital Twin, to integrate computation of structural deflections and temperatures in response to flight conditions, with resulting local damage and material state evolution. A conceptual model of how the Digital Twin can be used for predicting the life of aircraft structure and assuring its structural integrity is presented. The technical challenges to developing and deploying a Digital Twin are discussed in detail.

Meeting the Contact-Mechanics Challenge

Abstract: This paper summarizes the submissions to a recently announced contact-mechanics modeling challenge. The task was to solve a typical, albeit mathematically fully defined problem on the adhesion between nominally flat surfaces. The surface topography of the rough, rigid substrate, the elastic properties of the indenter, as well as the short-range adhesion between indenter and substrate, were specified so that diverse quantities of interest, e.g., the distribution of interfacial stresses at a given load or the mean gap as a function of load, could be computed and compared to a reference solution. Many different solution strategies were pursued, ranging from traditional asperity-based models via Persson theory and brute-force computational approaches, to real-laboratory experiments and all-atom molecular dynamics simulations of a model, in which the original assignment was scaled down to the atomistic scale. While each submission contained satisfying answers for at least a subset of the posed questions, efficiency, versatility, and accuracy differed between methods, the more precise methods being, in general, computationally more complex. The aim of this paper is to provide both theorists and experimentalists with benchmarks to decide which method is the most appropriate for a particular application and to gauge the errors associated with each one.

A phase-field model for ductile fracture at finite strains and its experimental verification

Abstract: In this paper, a phase-field model for ductile fracture previously proposed in the kinematically linear regime is extended to the three-dimensional finite strain setting, and its predictions are qualitatively and quantitatively compared with several experimental results, both from ad-hoc tests carried out by the authors and from the available literature. The proposed model is based on the physical assumption that fracture occurs when a scalar measure of the accumulated plastic strain reaches a critical value, and such assumption is introduced through the dependency of the phase-field degradation function on this scalar measure. The proposed model is able to capture the experimentally observed sequence of elasto-plastic deformation, necking and fracture phenomena in flat specimens; the occurrence of cup-and-cone fracture patterns in axisymmetric specimens; the role played by notches and by their size on the measured displacement at fracture; and the sequence of distinct cracking events observed in more complex specimens.