Preface to the special volume on the third Sandia Fracture Challenge

• Published in: International journal of fracture Vol. 218; no. 1-2; pp. 1 - 4
• Main Author: Kramer, Sharlotte L. B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-07-2019; Springer Nature B.V; Springer
• Subjects: Automotive Engineering; Characterization and Evaluation of Materials; Chemistry and Materials Science; Civil Engineering; Classical Mechanics; ENGINEERING; Materials Science; Mechanical Engineering; Sandia Fracture Challenge 2017
• ISSN: 0376-9429; 1573-2673
• DOI: 10.1007/s10704-019-00370-0

The mounting reliance on computational simulations to predict all aspects of the lifecycle of a mechanical system, from fabrication to failure, has prompted the mechanics community to selfassess its abilities to perform those predictions. Benchmark problems in mechanics that compare simulations that use different computational approaches with experiments have sprung up lately, including the NIST AM-Bench looking at additively manufactured (AM) materials (https://www.nist.gov/ambench),the Contact-Mechanics Challenge (Miiser, 2017) considering adhesion between two nominally flat surfaces, Numisheet providing semiannual benchmarking activities in sheet metal forming (http://numisheet2018.org),and the Sandia Fracture Challenge (SFC) (Boyce, 2014 and Boyce, 2016) investigating ductile failure. The previous SFCs have shown that progress has been made in computations of ductile failure, but improvements still can be made, hence the third Sandia Fracture Challenge (SFC3), the subject of this Special Volume. The most recent installment of SFC is building on previous successes and tackling the difficult problem of fracture in an AM 316L stainless steel structure.