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EURECAT – Fatigue and Fracture advanced characterisation techniques for high-performance lightweight materials

EARTO Innovation Awards 2021 – Impact Expected Category

There are different standard testing procedures to characterise the fatigue and fracture toughness of lightweight materials. However, these testing procedures are very expensive and time consuming since they involve exhaustive specimen preparation and long testing times. Such characteristics impede the implementation of these techniques as routine testing for material screening at the industrial level.

Innovation: EARTO Member Eurecat developed a set of innovative and inexpensive alternative testing strategies for fatigue and fracture characterization of high-performance lightweight sheet materials in the transport sector. The fracture toughness test is a simple method that uses specimens with mechanically sheared notches. The fatigue test is a load sequence based on damage evolution.

Impact Expected: The innovation will reach the market by the end of 2022 as a service offered through the launch of FormPlanet Open Innovation Test Bed, which is currently under construction. The solutions dramatically reduces the testing time of lightweight materials: with its fracture toughness approach, from 20 hours to less than 15 minutes at lab scale and with its fatigue method, from 1 week to less than 3 hours. These novel technolgies result in a better optimisation of material selection in the application of lightweight materials in the European industry.