Nilesh Kumar
University of Alabama, AL·Materials Science·Early-career
Metals can crack and fail when a steady pull is combined with a corrosive environment such as salt water, even at loads the metal would otherwise carry safely. This phenomenon, stress corrosion cracking (SCC), has caused catastrophic failures in aircraft, bridges and pipelines, with economic losses and loss of life.
- Fields
Materials Science
Engineering
- Topics
stress corrosion cracking
creep deformation
constant load testing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Develop a stress corrosion cracking test that applies constant load to smooth dog-bone tensile specimens in an electrochemical environment, adapting creep-testing concepts to capture crack initiation and propagation.
- Correlate deformation data with microstructure by interrupting tests at intervals and imaging the evolving microscopic structure with advanced microscopy, focusing on the secondary (steady-state) deformation regime.
- Test whether measurements taken only through the secondary regime can predict the operative cracking mechanism and the time to fracture, yielding deformation rate and other quantitative parameters.
- Build a route from short-term accelerated laboratory tests to long-term life prediction for metallic components in service, supporting SCC-resistant structural design.
- Train graduate and undergraduate students in SCC experimentation through a new course with hands-on activities and a summer workshop bringing together students, engineers and researchers.
More about the research
Much of what engineers know about it comes from empirical testing. Tests are slow, often miss the earliest stages of cracking, and give little insight into mechanisms. There is also no good way to translate accelerated laboratory results into predictions for real service conditions.
Why it matters
Stress corrosion cracking drives failures in bridges, pipelines and aircraft. A faster test that captures crack initiation and supports quantitative life prediction from short experiments could help engineers design metals and load-bearing structures with greater resistance to this form of degradation, improving safety and reducing the cost of unexpected failures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
William Musinski
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, WI·Materials Science·Early-career
Measure strains inside grains, dislocation substructures and grain boundary interactions before and during fatigue cracking, using synchrotron high-energy X-ray diffraction, which sees inside metals as they deform, together with high-resolution microscopy.
Burkan Isgor
Oregon State University, OR·Materials Science
Develop laser-based additive manufacturing settings for functionally graded austenitic and duplex stainless steel claddings on curved carbon steel, using both wire and powder feedstocks.
Yingchao Yang
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Materials Science·Early-career
Synthesize single-layer and multilayer two-dimensional high entropy materials containing at least five elements, using solid-state reaction and chemical vapor deposition.
The school
University of Alabama: 22 labs on PI Pages, $221M a year on research, 235 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.