TC05 Update 2008

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 forty active members. It normally meets for one or two days, twice per year at varied European locations, with around 15 members normally attending, although lately numbers have been reduced. The following meetings were held recently:-

April 2007 - Corus Steel, Rotherham, UK

October 2007 – SCK-CEN Brussels, Belgium

By agreement, there was no Spring meeting in 2008, and the next meeting will be arranged for October/November, venue to be finalised.

Our test procedure on sub-size Charpy V is officially available as Annex D of the standard ISO14556, also developed by TC5.

The ISO document about precracked Charpy specimens is at the CD (Committee Draft) stage, and if all goes well at the September 2008 ISO meeting in Hannover, it will move to the DIS (Draft International Standard) stage. This method has also been taken up by ASTM E 08 and is planned to be included in future E1820/E1921 fracture standards. TC5 member Enrico Lucon of SCK/CEN Belgium has continued his valuable assistance at ISO and ASTM committees, and the chairman has also been able to attend recent ASTM meetings.

The round-robin on high-rate tensile testing of sheet materials is complete, but some limited work continues on data analysis techniques. TC5 members are also closely involved in developing the new ISO sheet test standard. Hopefully some aspects of our ESIS procedure on dynamic tensile testing P7-00 can also be included; if not it remains a committee objective to take this document to ISO independently.

The procedure on impact compression has made good progress, with a successful round-robin on armco iron. There will be a paper by TC5 member Jan Dzugan on this topic at ECF 17 in Brno, and the method has been applied successfully to structural steels and titanium alloy in tests at Imperial College London. The chairman has been invited to speak at a NATO Workshop on damaged Structures in Slovenia in October, which will publicise our work to a wider audience.

A number of new work initiatives are planned, including pre-cracked sub-size Charpy testing, and these are under discussion. The chairman has now retired from the Dymat Governing Board under their rules, but continues in close contact.