CDS&E: Corrosion-induced Damage and Fracture: Pushing Micro-Scale Simulations to the Macro-Scale, in Both Space and Time

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Corrosion can be a precursor to fracture and catastrophic failure in structures and systems in all aspects of life. Understanding how corrosion-induced changes in material properties at the small scale lead to fracture and damage at a much larger scale can reduce costs to the broader economy by tens of billions of dollars each year. It can also prevent loss of life from catastrophic failure of man-made systems. The knowledge gained from this project will improve safety and resilience in a broad array of material systems—ranging from transportation to infrastructure and medicine. The project will train graduate, undergraduate, and middle and high school students and will produce a handbook on modeling of material degradation and failure. The knowledge gained from the research will be broadly disseminated through an open-source computational platform, a simulation app, and by organizing conference symposia.This award will create a new class of highly efficient nonlocal solvers allowing unprecedented access to multiple spatial and temporal scales in simulation of material degradation and failure caused by dissolution-type phenomena-- pushing the currently reachable space and time-scales of computational models from micrometers and minutes, to meters and years. This project creates efficient solvers to perform massively-parallel, large-scale simulations capable of linking the disparate spatial and temporal scales relevant in these problems. Specifically, novel boundary-adapted spectral methods for peridynamic models of diffusion, deformation, corrosion damage and fracture will exploit the convolution structure of nonlocal operators to solve transient problems with billions of degrees of freedom efficiently. The researchers will also perform numerical analysis and error estimation for the new methods. A coupled mechano-chemical spectral method for peridynamics will enable simulation of corrosion-induced failure in materials at the structure-level while accounting for micro-scale effects, thereby spanning length-scales and time scales previously unreachable.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.