Turning defects into allies to develop intrinsic resistance to hydrogen-induced fractures (ResistHfracture)

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Hydrogen is said to be both a blessing and a curse. It is ubiquitous and its applications will drive the technology of a net-zero carbon society. However, it is also infamous for "embrittling" metallic materials, dramatically reducing their ductility, fracture toughness and fatigue crack growth resistance. Hydrogen-assisted failures are commonplace across the transport, defence, construction and energy sectors, and their prevention is being held back by the lack of mechanistic understanding of what is known to be a particularly challenging phenomenon. As a result, significant cross-disciplinary research efforts have been allocated to the characterisation of this hydrogen embrittlement phenomenon and to the development of observation-driven mechanistic interpretations. My aim for ResistHfracture is to bring a paradigm change by going from the analysis of the problem to the design of a new generation of materials that will provide intrinsic resistance to hydrogen-assisted cracking. This will be achieved by exploring a counter-intuitive paradigm that carries a high risk but potentially also a high return: to deliberately introduce defects that can act as 'beneficial traps', sequestering the hydrogen away from harmful locations and hindering hydrogen diffusion within the metal. Materials will be engineered with a spatially-controlled distribution of voids, establishing a new "hydrogen trapping" paradigm through the combination of experimental and computational techniques spanning the areas of solid mechanics, nanofabrication, phase field fracture, additive manufacturing, multi-scale materials characterisation, and physical chemistry. This multi-disciplinary endeavour will establish new avenues for counteracting the deleterious effect of hydrogen, bringing new fundamental insight on trapping and surface phenomena, and laying the scientific foundations for engineering solutions that can address the pressing need of safely deploying a hydrogen energy infrastructure