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  Fracture of Automotive Advanced High Strength Steels


   School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering

   Applications accepted all year round  Self-Funded PhD Students Only

About the Project

Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSS) are increasingly used throughout the chassis of modern cars since they provide a high strength-to-weight ratio and improved crashworthiness due to greater energy absorption capabilities. The development of new generation AHSS requires better understanding of damage development in the microstructure of the material leading to final fracture. This is still poorly understood and has been the limiting factor for the development of this new type of steel.

The University of Sheffield has established strong links with Tata Steel in the Netherlands to investigate the failure of Dual-Phase (DP) and Transformation-Induced-Plasticity (TRIP) steels using novel experimental and modelling techniques.

This PhD project will focus on the development of a physically-based model of damage and failure of automotive steels. The model will be informed and validated by experiments including in-situ tensile and bending tests carried out inside the chamber of a scanning electron microscope combined with Digital Image Correlation and a microgrid technique to measure local strain distributions in the microstructure up to failure. This project will be run in liaison with Tata Steel.
Engineering (12) Materials Science (24) Mathematics (25) Physics (29)

Funding Notes

1st or 2:1 degree in Engineering, Materials Science, Physics, Chemistry, Applied Mathematics, or other Relevant Discipline.

Previous experience / requirements: Finite element modelling, Metallurgy

Register your interest for this project


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