Collaborative Research: DMREF: Developing Damage Resistant Materials for Hydrogen Storage and Large-scale Transport.

随着氢经济的承诺比以往任何时候都更接近现实，设计、开发和部署能够支持和维持氢基础设施承诺的适当材料是非常重要的。与开发氢兼容基础设施相关的重要科学挑战之一是理解材料中氢致降解的基本原理，并开发用于储存和运输应用的适当耐氢材料。通过开发一个计算驱动的多尺度建模平台，该平台将由实验提供信息并与实验集成，该设计材料以革命和工程我们的未来（DMREF）项目旨在加快发现氢脆控制机制的步伐。正如材料基因组计划（MGI）所设想的那样，该项目旨在加快能源运输部门耐氢材料的开发，因为它从化石燃料的运输过渡到氢基能源。除了氢的储存和运输领域，从该项目中获得的基本见解也有助于设计具有更长寿命的耐疲劳和耐腐蚀的地下钢结构，该项目旨在提高裂纹尖端过程的基础知识，该过程控制疲劳载荷下的损伤累积和扩展，以及氢在疲劳中的作用。使得材料更容易断裂。据推测，控制机制发生在裂纹尖端周围的塑性区中，在约1至10微米的长度尺度上，这对于连续介质理论来说太小而无法预测，对于原子模拟来说太大而无法通过蛮力处理。这样一个知识差距在中尺度将通过紧密耦合的实验计算程序。计算工作将建立在原子模拟，位错动力学模拟，晶体塑性和连续级建模的见解的最新进展。实验工作将利用改进和独特的能力，包括纳米压痕，X射线断层扫描（与布鲁克海文国家实验室合作）和氢环境中的原位测试（将在桑迪亚国家实验室进行）。通过多尺度模拟与实验相结合，建立了氢对铁素体钢疲劳演化影响的多尺度模型。从该项目中获得的见解有可能导致可靠的工程路线图的寿命预测和风险评估的氢存储和运输结构的发展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

With the promise of a hydrogen economy being closer to reality than it has even been, there is an important need for the design, development, and deployment of appropriate materials that can support and sustain the promise of a hydrogen-based infrastructure. One of the important scientific challenges associated with developing a hydrogen-compatible infrastructure is an understanding of the fundamentals of hydrogen-induced degradation in materials and developing appropriate hydrogen-resistant materials for storage and transport applications. By developing a computationally driven multi-scale modeling platform that will be informed by, and integrated with, experiments, this Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) project aims to accelerate the pace at which the controlling mechanisms of hydrogen embrittlement are discovered. As envisioned by the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), this project will aim to enable the faster development of hydrogen-resistant materials for the energy transportation sector as it transitions from the transport of fossil fuels to hydrogen-based sources. Beyond the field of hydrogen storage and transport, the fundamental insights obtained from this project could also be helpful in designing fatigue- and corrosion-resistant sub-surface steel structures with longer lifetimes, which could enable materials designs for many other industries as well.This project aims to advance fundamental knowledge of crack tip processes that control damage accumulation and propagation under fatigue loading and the role of hydrogen in making the material more susceptible to fracture. It is hypothesized that the controlling mechanisms occur in the plastic zone around the crack tip, over a length scale of about 1 to 10 microns, which is too small for continuum theory to be predictive and too large for atomistic simulations to handle by brute force. Such a knowledge gap at the mesoscale will be closed through a tightly coupled experimental-computational program. Computational efforts will build upon the recent advances made in atomistic simulations, dislocation dynamics simulations, with insights on crystal plasticity and continuum-level modeling. The experimental efforts will leverage improved and unique capabilities that include nanoindentation, x-ray tomography (in conjunction with Brookhaven National Laboratory), and in situ testing in hydrogen environments (to be conducted at Sandia National Laboratory). By combining modeling and experiments over multiple length-scales, an experimentally validated multi-scale model for hydrogen effects on fatigue evolution in ferritic steels could be established. Insights obtained from this project have the potential to lead to the development of reliable engineering roadmaps for life prediction and risk assessment for hydrogen storage and transport structures.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.