M2i is proud to announce that on January 10, 2019, Astrid Elzas, who worked on M2i organized FOM-M2i Industrial Partnership Program “Physics of Failure”, successfully defended her dissertation “Nano-scale failure in steel: Interface decohesion at iron/precipitate interfaces”. She obtained her PhD cum laude.
Astrid worked on the project within FOM-M2i Industrial Partnership Program ‘Physics of Failure’ in collaboration with Tata Steel and SKF. In her work she studied the micro and nano phenomena responsible for damage initiation and failure through modelling at atomistics scale. Within a multi-scale approach of plasticity and fracture, this project aimed at developing a cohesive law for the mixed-mode behaviour of an interface between a soft bcc material and a hard anisotropic second phase (including precipitates and inclusions).
The dissertation comes to the conclusion that the interface structure is the key factor determining the interface behavior. It was shown that interface for which the structure has changed, partly or entirely, shows a different behavior than the original interface structure. For some interfaces this means that interface decohision occurs at much lower applied loads than for the original interface.
Astrid started her PhD in 2014 at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Delft University of Technology in Computational Science group led by Prof.dr. Barend Thijsse. Before starting her PhD she has obtained a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from TU Delft (2013) and BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (2003).
We would like to wish Astrid success in her future carrier.