Durability conference held in Cambridge

An Engineering Integrity Society product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Apr 24, 2007

A record number of delegates attended Fatigue 2007, an increase of approximately 50% on the last Fatigue conference, also held at Queens' in 2003.

Fatigue 2007, the sixth international conference to be organised by the Durability and Fatigue Committee, was held at Queens' College, University of Cambridge on 26th - 28th March, 2007.

A record number of delegates attended the event, an increase of approximately 50% on the last Fatigue conference, also held at Queens' in 2003.

This upsurge in interest can be attributed to a number of factors.

Firstly, an impressive array of technical sponsors and co-sponsoring institutions ensured maximum publicity for the event during the previous 12-month period.

Secondly, a strong International Technical Committee (ITC) was convened on this occasion, drawing from leading academic and industrial practitioners in the Fatigue community.

The ITC, together with high-profile plenary and keynote speakers, undoubtedly attracted many people.

The individual members of the ITC provided much needed help to the conference organising committee, reviewing papers in the preparation stages and offering their services as session chairs during the meeting.

The breadth of topics covered during the technical sessions was notably extensive, exemplified by the three plenary papers.

Jean-Louis Chaboche from Onera, France, long regarded for his contributions towards understanding high-temperature damage accumulation under creep-fatigue interaction, provided the opening presentation outlining the latest experimental and modelling efforts supporting complex thermo-mechanical fatigue assessment.

It had been clear from the original "call for papers" that interest in TMF and multi-axial fatigue evaluation is clearly alive and well across European laboratories.

The second plenary, provided by Gregorz Glinka of Waterloo University in Canada, reviewed his ongoing research into modelling fatigue crack growth behaviour.

Impressive progress has been made through the collaborative efforts of a multidisciplinary team supported by the US Navy, offering excellent predictions of measured crack growth in operational structures subjected to random load cycles.

These models are receiving much attention amongst the fatigue community, not least because they bring into question the contribution, or otherwise, of crack closure - a topic of lively debate during questions.

The final plenary speaker, Paul Bowen of Birmingham University, described the efforts of the aerospace industry and Rolls-Royce in particular to design and manufacture safety critical rotating components from metal matrix composites.

After a 15-year development phase, continuous fibre re-inforced titanium alloys are approaching service applications, bringing with them demands for fatigue assessment and component lifing.

During the course of the meeting, selected speakers were considered for the EIS Durability Prize, awarded to the best "young" presenter.

In this context, current students or engineers who have recently entered employment after a period of study or training were deemed eligible.

A panel of judges was assembled from the ITC and they eventually offered two awards - recognising the quality of presentations from one overseas and one UK-based presenter.