Foreword Special Issue of Advanced Engineering Materials on Euromat Transport-Related symposia
✍ Scribed by Dirk Lehmhus
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 57 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1438-1656
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Transport industry is a field as wide as the distances its products cover. In the context of the present special issue of Advanced Engineering Materials, this means wider than the world itself: Among the objects the following studies focus on are automotive, railway and aircraft structures, but also spacecraft components. Despite this considerable scope, some issues remain the same in all fields and thus provide an additional link besides the notion of a common application. These are the needs for weight reduction, sufficient material workability, competitive manufacturing costs and, not independent of the former, occupant or payload protection. To be sure, protection against what again distinguishes vehicles meant to serve in outer space from their more earthly counterpartswhereas in the latter case mechanical impact, e. g. in crash scenarios, is the area of primary concern, thermal loads during atmospheric re-entry require most attention in the former.
The contributions show that fundamental studies of phenomena well established in everyday engineering production, such as precipitation hardening of aluminium alloys, can still reveal new insights. These may in turn find their way into new methods for tailoring materials properties to a specific application's needs. As groups, cellular materials and composites figure highly when it comes to jointly addressing lightweight design and safety issues. Composite in this case means both ceramic (for lightweight thermal protection) and polymer matrix as well as long fibre reinforced light metal alloy based materials. Hybrid materials combining two or more of the basic materials classes of polymers, metals and ceramics are emerging and offer similar promise. With their advent, optimal or intelligent material design in itself has become a feasible, though still challenging issue which deserves to be considered a new branch in application-oriented materials science. Associated design or computing tools are thus becoming more and more important.The increasing level of complexity that goes with these approaches will benefit from in-depth characterisation efforts aimed at developing a similarly profound understanding of failure mechanisms, and modelling of materials degradation and failure. Besides, there is an associated need for improved control of manufacturing processes which can either be based on sensor-equipped tools, or on sensor integration within the materials themselves, allowing structural monitoring throughout the production and life cycle. Data gathered during component life may in turn be fed back into the design and production process and contribute to implementing simulation-based strategies for materials design.
Summing up, the variety of answers to the initially formulated central questions highlights the vibrancy of materials science and engineering as a research area, and it underlines that even after decades of development innovations are still to be expected, be it in materials development, modelling and simulation, processing or design.
The contributions collected here have been presented at the Euromat 2009 conference organised by FEMS, the federation of European Materials Society's, and held in Glasgow from September 7 th to 10 th , 2009.