In the Middle Ages, blacksmiths used to combine alchemy, black magic and enormous skills to forge the swords celebrated in ancient fairy tales, those with a very flexible and strong blade. Nowadays, the dream of a material combining flexibility and strength can come true thanks to "inclusions" of a very resistant and stiff material (such as ceramics) in a flexible (for example metallic) material, called the "matrix".
The research group of Solid and Structural Mechanics of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering of the University of Trento has been studying ultra-resistant materials for some time and has recently published a work conducted in collaboration with Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the University of Padova. The engineers of the University of Trento have learned that the "International Journal of Solids and Structures" has decided to use an image from their research work for the cover of all the issues that will be published in 2022, starting with no. 236–237.
"We have developed an expertise in predicting the concentration of strains in solid modeling with high-contrast inclusions", said Francesco Dal Corso and Davide Bigoni, engineers at UniTrento. They continued: "We have carried out a collapse analysis of reinforced materials with very thin and stiff inclusions. These types of reinforcements are adopted to increase the overall stiffness of the material but, at the same time, they can facilitate the formation of particular collapse mechanisms that take the name of "shear bands". The analyses show how the collapse can be triggered or delayed, and therefore reveal the way to go to create ultra-resistant materials that can be used, for example, in advanced applications in the mechanical and aerospace industry". The group investigated what happens, in terms of strength and breaking points, when more than 1500 inclusions are inserted into another material. The research work was carried out on volumes of material 25 times the length of the inclusions.
The list of the issues of the "International Journal of Solids and Structures" that have already been published or are in publication in 2022 is available at:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/international-journal-of-solids-an...