TC05 Update 2006

The activities of TC5 include the exchange of expertise in all aspects of impact fracture and high-strain rate material properties, and the development of agreed test methods in these fields, leading to ESIS or International standards. TC5 members work closely on standards issues with Dymat and with the relevant ASTM E08 and E28 committees. New committee members are always welcome.

TC5 has about sixty active members. It normally meets for one or two days, twice per year at varied European locations, with around 20 members normally attending. The following meetings were held recently:- April 2005 - CIDAUT, Valladolid, Spain; September 2005 - TU Vienna, Austria; April 2006 – Inst of Physics of Materials, Brno, Czech Republic The next meeting is planned for October 2006, with the venue to be finalised.

Recent technical highlights include completion of the test procedure on sub-size Charpy V, which is now under consideration by ISO TC164/SC4P. This will be added as an annex to the instrumented Charpy method ISO14556 which was also developed by TC5. Work on the pre-cracked Charpy test method is complete after 15 years work. If all goes well, it will be accepted as a work item by ISO TC164 later this year.

Work also continues on the development of methods for high-rate tensile testing of sheet materials. A round-robin has been completed on testing steels, aluminium and magnesium alloys at strain rates of 40/sec and 400/sec. The programme is currently in the data analysis phase, and TC5 members have been closely involved in developing a new German standard high-rate test for sheet steels for the automotive industry. The work on impact compression has re-started, with a new round-robin on aluminium alloys in late 2005; initial results look promising.

The committee made a further determined effort to obtain EC funding to support its work, with the HIRATE Co-ordination Action proposal on high rate testing and modelling procedures submitted under FP6 in 2005. This ambitious programme, involving more that 20 partner institutions, passed all the evaluation thresholds but was not funded. We are considering the best way to proceed.

Several TC5 members attended the successful Dymat conference in Porto in September 2003, and the chairman was elected to the Dymat governing board. John Sturges of Leeds Metropolitan University resigned as secretary at the end of 2004, and has been succeeded by Celia Watson from RMCS Shrivenham.

The current officers of TC5 are:

chairman - Hugh MacGillivray, Imperial College London, UK [h.macgill@imperial.ac.uk]

vice-chairs - Gyongyver Lenkey, Bay Zoltan Institute, Miskolc, Hungary [lenkey@bzlogi.hu] and Uwe Mayer, MPA Stuttgart, Germany [Uwe.Mayer@mpa.uni-stuttgart.de]

secretary – Celia Watson, RMCS [c.h.watson@cranfield.ac.uk]