The Sandia Fracture Challenges provide the mechanics community a forum for assessing its ability to predict ductile fracture through a blind, round-robin format where mechanicians are challenged to predict the deformation and failure of an arbitrary geometry given experimental calibration data. The Third Challenge, issued in 2017, required participants to predict fracture in an additively manufactured 316L stainless steel tensile-bar configuration containing through holes and internal cavities that could not have been conventionally machined. The volunteer participants were provided extensive materials data, from tensile tests of specimens printed on the same build tray to electron backscatter diffraction maps of the microstructure and micro-computed tomography scans of the Challenge geometry. The teams were asked to predict a number of quantities of interest in the response, including predictions of variability in the resulting fracture response, as the basis for assessment of the predictive capabilities of the modeling and simulation strategies. This paper describes the Third Challenge, compares the experimental results to the predictions, and identifies successes and gaps in capabilities in both the experimental procedures and the computational analyses to inform future investigations.
This paper summarizes an emerging process to establish credibility for surrogate models that cover multidimensional, continuous solution spaces. Various features lead to disagreement between the surrogate model's results and results from more precise computational benchmark solutions. In our verification process, this disagreement is quantified using descriptive statistics to support uncertainty quantification, sensitivity analysis, and surrogate model assessments. Our focus is stress-intensity factor (SIF) solutions. SIFs can be evaluated from simulations (e.g., finite element analyses), but these simulations require significant preprocessing, computational resources, and expertise to produce a credible result. It is not tractable (or necessary) to simulate a SIF for every crack front. Instead, most engineering analyses of fatigue crack growth (FCG) employ surrogate SIF solutions based on some combination of mechanics, interpolation, and SIF solutions extracted from earlier analyses. SIF values from surrogate solutions vary with local stress profiles and nondimensional degrees-of-freedom that define the geometry. The verification process evaluates the selected stress profiles and the sampled geometries using the surrogate model and a benchmark code (abaqus). The benchmark code employs a Python scripting interface to automate model development, execution, and extraction of key results. The ratio of the test code SIF to the benchmark code SIF measures the credibility of the solution. Descriptive statistics of these ratios provide convenient measures of relative surrogate quality. Thousands of analyses support visualization of the surrogate model's credibility, e.g., by rank-ordering of the credibility measure.
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