2022 National ITRP Symposium (Brisbane)

The very first Industrial Transformation Research Program (ITRP) Symposium for Australian Research Council (ARC) funded research took place on the 12th-13th September 2022 in Brisbane. Business managers of the ARC funded training centres and research hubs across Australia were present. Moreover, delegates from the ARC joined in person and online. Dr. Daniel Grasser represented the mineAlloy Industrial Transformation Training Centre (ITTC) to discuss options for more efficient business procedures and increased collaboration within the training centres and research hubs. Additional important topics were research excellence, the education of future leaders and strategies to retain key talents within Australia. The symposium was a full success and more are to follow in 2023.

State-of-the-art wear simulations

Dr. Alban de Vaucorbeil is specialised in the development of analytical and numerical models for the simulation of materials and structures. Within the mineAlloy centre, his expertise contributes to the understanding of the relationship between the material parameters and wear. The anticipated outcome of Alban’s work is the understanding of the occurring mechanisms, such as work hardening effects and damage effects, and how they affect wear. This will guide the development of improved wear resistant alloys for the mining industry.

In particular, Alban is an expert in particle-based methods: numerical methods for the simulation of solids (or fluids) subjected to large and extremely large deformation. He started his work on wear by using Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH); together with his collaborators he developed an improved SPH formulation for the simulation of damage and fracture of ductile materials (https://doi.org/10.1002/nme.6306).

Additionally, Alban is using the Material Point Method (MPM). The MPM has several benefits compared to SPH and is constructed upon the Finite Element Method (FEM). He developed an improved version: the Total Lagrangian Material Point Method (TLMPM), which eliminated the numerically induced fracture in solids under extremely large deformation (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2019.112783). The effectiveness of this new method was demonstrated in a recent paper showing how it is used to simulate scratch tests in copper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2022.111432). Attention therefore was given to the development of a non-local damage formulation for TLMPM (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cma.2021.114388).

Alban has been pushing the limits of the state-of-the-art of particle-based wear simulations, such as the development of a new MPM code: Karamelo (https://karamelo.org/).