At the invitation of our college, Associate Professor Qian Xudong from the National University of Singapore (NUS) delivered an academic lecture titled An Engineering Fracture Mechanics Approach to Integrate Material Fracture in Large-Scale Steel Structures in the Lecture Hall of the Comprehensive Building on Xiaozhai Campus on the morning of November 1, 2023. The lecture was hosted by Associate Professor Liao Fangfang from the School of Civil Engineering, and a number of teachers as well as more than 30 postgraduate students from the School of Civil Engineering attended the event.
Fracture failure has become one of the most common failure modes of modern large-scale steel structures under man-made or environmental actions. Fracture integrity assessment requires a detailed understanding of the fracture resistance of materials at the material level. However, the scalability between the material's fracture toughness and fracture resistance in structural components is a key obstacle to the fracture assessment and characterization of large-scale steel structures. During the lecture, Associate Professor Qian Xudong first proposed innovative experimental methods or experimental-computational hybrid methods for material fracture resistance characterized by the material's J-R curve. These material-level investigations cover unconventional specimens, including mixed-mode fracture specimens, surface-cracked specimens, and circumferentially welded pipes. Combining the material fracture resistance curve with the extended η-method, a practical approach was proposed to embed the material's J-R curve into the load-deformation relationship of critical welded joints, which phenomenologically describes the impact of ductile crack growth and subsequent unstable fracture failure on the load-bearing capacity of welded joints.
At the lecture venue, teachers and students showed great interest in the content and engaged in in-depth discussions and exchanges with Associate Professor Qian Xudong.
