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

据说氢气既是福也是祸。它无处不在，它的应用将推动净零碳社会的技术。然而，它也因使金属材料脆化而臭名昭著，极大地降低了它们的延展性、断裂韧性和抗疲劳裂纹扩展能力。氢气辅助故障在运输、国防、建筑和能源部门司空见惯，由于缺乏对这一已知特别具有挑战性的现象的机械性理解，防止氢气辅助故障的工作正在受阻。因此，大量跨学科的研究工作被分配到描述这种氢脆现象的特征和发展观察驱动的机械论解释上。我对ResistHFracture的目标是通过从分析问题到设计新一代材料来带来范式的变化，这种材料将提供对氢气辅助破裂的内在抵抗。这将通过探索一种反直觉的范式来实现，这种范式具有高风险，但也有可能带来高回报：故意引入缺陷，这些缺陷可能会充当“有益的陷阱”，将氢隔离在有害位置之外，并阻碍氢在金属中的扩散。材料的设计将具有空间可控的空洞分布，通过实验和计算技术的结合，建立一种新的“氢捕获”范例，涵盖固体力学、纳米制造、相场断裂、添加制造、多尺度材料表征和物理化学等领域。这一多学科的努力将为抵消氢的有害影响建立新的途径，为捕获和表面现象带来新的基本见解，并为解决安全部署氢能基础设施的迫切需要的工程解决方案奠定科学基础。

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