Rajan Tandon

Controlling the Fragmentation Behavior of Stressed Glass

Inducing compressive surface stress profiles in brittle materials is a well-known approach for strengthening. The compressive stress inhibits crack initiation and propagation. The effect has been observed for tempered and ion-exchanged glasses,1, 2, 3, 4 and for oxide ceramics.5,6 While it is generally accepted that the magnitude of the stress and its depth determine the strength response, it has recently been demonstrated that the shape of the compressive stress profile can radically alter the strength distribution.7 For tempered glasses, the role of the internal tensile stress in causing fragmentation is well known,8 although it is not possible to predict the extent of fragmentation.9

Analysis of macroscopic crack branching patterns in chemically strengthened glass

Residual stress profiles were introduced in sodium aluminosilicate glass disks using an ion-exchange process. They were fractured in two loading conditions: indentation and biaxial flexure. The fractal dimension of the macroscopic crack branching pattern called the crack branching coefficient (CBC), as well as the number of fragments (NOF) were used to quantify the crack patterns. The fracture surfaces were analyzed to determine the stresses responsible for the crack branching patterns. The total strain energy in the body was calculated. The CBC was a good measure of the NOF. They are directly related to the tensile strain energy due to the residual stress profile for fractures due to indentation loading. However, in general for materials with residual stresses, CBC (or NOF) is not related to the strength or the stress at fracture, or even to the total stored tensile strain energy. Instead, the CBC appears to be related, in a complex manner, to the distribution of stresses in the body. Therefore, in general, the characterization of the CBC of fractured materials cannot be used to ascertain the prior stress distribution.

Small Strain Plasticity Behavior of 304L Stainless Steel in Glass-to-Metal Seal Applications

Cracks in glass-to-metal seals can be a threat to the hermeticity of isolated electronic components. Design and manufacturing of the materials and processes can be tailored to minimize the residual stresses responsible for cracking. However, this requires high fidelity material modeling accounting for the plastic strains in the metals, mismatched thermal shrinkage and property changes experienced as the glass solidifies during cooling of the assembly in manufacturing. Small plastic strains of just a few percent are typical during processing of glass-to-metal seals and yet can generate substantial tensile stresses in the glass during elastic unloading in thermal cycling. Therefore, experimental methods were developed to obtain very accurate measurements of strain near and just beyond the proportional limit. Small strain tensile characterization experiments were conducted with varying levels and rates of strain ratcheting over the temperatures range of −50 to 550 °C, with particular attention near the glass transition temperature of 500 °C. Additional experiments were designed to quantify the effects of stress relaxation and reloading. The experimental techniques developed and resulting data will be presented. Details of constitutive modeling efforts and glass material experiments and modeling can be found in Chambers et al. (Characterization & modeling of materials in glass-to-metal seals: Part I. SAND14-0192. Sandia National Laboratories, January 2014).

Practical aspects of using Hertzian ring crack initiation to measure surface flaw densities in glasses: influence of humidity, friction and searched areas

Ring crack initiation loads on glass, using spherical Tungsten carbide (WC) and glass (G) indenters, are measured and analysed. Our measurements demonstrate that environmental humidity plays a key role in determining the load to fracture; experiments conducted without controlling this variable cannot be used to obtain material properties. The role of friction is explicitly considered for dissimilar (WC–G) elastic contacts. For this material pair, the stresses at fracture are well described by a boundary lubrication value of friction coefficient. The fracture loads are used in a fracture-mechanics formulation to calculate crack sizes on glass surfaces. The ‘searched-area’ concept for dissimilar contacts is described, and used to provide crack density values for these surfaces.

Viscoelasticity of Glass-Forming Materials: What About Inorganic Sealing Glasses?

Glass forming materials like polymers exhibit a variety of complex, nonlinear, time-dependent relaxations in volume, enthalpy and stress, all of which affect material performance and aging. Durable product designs rely on the capability to predict accurately how these materials will respond to mechanical loading and temperature regimes over prolonged exposures to operating environments. This cannot be achieved by developing a constitutive framework to fit only one or two types of experiments. Rather, it requires a constitutive formalism that is quantitatively predictive to engineering accuracy for the broad range of observed relaxation behaviors. Moreover, all engineering analyses must be performed from a single set of material model parameters. The rigorous nonlinear viscoelastic Potential Energy Clock (PEC) model and its engineering phenomenological equivalent, the Simplified Potential Energy Clock (SPEC) model, were developed to fulfill such roles and have been applied successfully to thermoplastics and filled and unfilled thermosets. Recent work has provided an opportunity to assess the performance of the SPEC model in predicting the viscoelastic behavior of an inorganic sealing glass. This presentation will overview the history of PEC and SPEC and describe the material characterization, model calibration and validation associated with the high Tg (~460 °C) sealing glass.

Proposed Testing to Assess the Accuracy of Glass-To-Metal Seal Stress Analyses.

The material characterization tests conducted on 304L VAR stainless steel and Schott 8061 glass have provided higher fidelity data for calibration of material models used in Glass - T o - Metal (GTM) seal analyses. Specifically, a Thermo - Multi - Linear Elastic Plastic ( thermo - MLEP) material model has be en defined for S S304L and the Simplified Potential Energy Clock nonlinear visc oelastic model has been calibrated for the S8061 glass. To assess the accuracy of finite element stress analyses of GTM seals, a suite of tests are proposed to provide data for comparison to mo del predictions.

Large motion high cycle high speed optical fibers for space based applications.

Future remote sensing applications will require higher resolution and therefore higher data rates (up to perhaps 100 gigabits per second) while achieving lower mass and cost. A current limitation to the design space is high speed high bandwidth data does not cross movable gimbals because of cabling issues. This requires the detectors to be off gimbal. The ability to get data across the gimbal would open up efficiencies in designs where the detectors and the electronics can be placed anywhere on the system. Fiber optic cables provide light weight high speed high bandwidth connections. Current options are limited to 20,000 cycles as opposed to the 1,000,000 cycles needed for future space based applications. To extend this to the million+ regime, requires a thorough understanding of the failure mechanisms and the materials, proper selection of materials (e.g., glass and jacket material) allowable geometry changes to the cable, radiation hardness, etc.