Development and Application of Friction-Free Bending for Assessment of Material Properties under Complex Loading Conditions

Project began May 2025.

The research objective is the development of a material workability testing methodology to enable rapid, data-rich, quantitative understanding of the material processing-structure-property-performance relationship. The resultant high-resolution data concerning material shape, displacement, and strain response to applied load are expected to be invaluable when screening candidate materials for hull structures and other vehicle components, integrating point-of-need manufacturing using digital engineering tools, and developing predictive models to assess material and component performance under operational conditions. The results of this test method are not intended to replace the material performance metrics derived from uniaxial tension testing but serve to complement; the workability testing technique will provide valuable insight into amenability to metalworking operations and material performance under complex loading scenarios while the tensile data provides relevance to elastic design of machines and structures.

To achieve this goal, two primary activities must occur:

1. Development of a VDA 238-100 friction-free type bend testing fixture and methodology applicable to material in plate formats with in situ deformation monitoring via integration of the DIC technique.
2. Collection of quantitative material property data using both uniaxial tensile testing and VDA 238-100 bend testing.

Successful development of the testing fixture and collection of sufficiently high-quality material property data are anticipated to allow the researchers to begin to address the fundamental question posed here: Can the influence of material structure and processing upon mechanical properties, with a specific focus on the measurement of intrinsic ductility, be assessed using a bending-based workability testing technique? The researchers anticipate, that if material performance metrics derived from bend testing are found to accurately describe the intrinsic ductility of the material, application of a single workability testing technique may provide a broad, manufacturing process and stress-state independent description of material processing-structure-property-performance relationships.

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