Salah Ramtani

Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Commercial Purity HIPed and Crushed Aluminum

Ultrafine-grained aluminum microstructures were processed from commercial purity powder by combining hot isostatic pressing (HIP) and dynamic severe plastic deformation (DSPD). After the first step, the bulk consolidated material showed a random texture and homogeneous microstructure of equiaxed grains with an average size of 2µm. The material was then subsequently impacted, using a falling weight at a strain rate of 300s-1. The resulting material showed a microstructure having an average grain size of about 500 nm with a strong gradient of fiber-like crystallographic texture parallel to the impact direction. The mechanical properties of the impacted material were subsequently characterized under compressive tests at room temperature at a strain rate of 10-4s-1. The effect of the change of the deformation path on the mechanical response parallel (DN) and perpendicular (DT) to the impact direction was also investigated. These results are here discussed in relation with microstructure and texture evolution.

Effect of processing conditions on microstructure and mechanical behaviour of metals sintered from nanopowders

The influence of the consolidation conditions on the microstructure and plastic behavior of ultrafine-grained Ni and Al sintered from nanopowders was studied. It was found that the smaller initial Ni powder particle size yielded a smaller grain size and a larger oxide content in the as-consolidated sample resulting in a higher strength and lower ductility. When the Ni nanopowder was in contact with air (instead of an inert atmosphere) during the short handling time before sintering, the oxide content increased without a considerable change of the grain size that also decreased the ductility. The reduced time and temperature in Spark Plasma Sintering compared to Hot Isostatic Pressing led to a smaller grain size that resulted in a higher strength of Ni. In the case of an Al nanopowder processed by Hot Isostatic Pressing at 450 °C, the consolidation was hindered by the strongly limited diffusion due to the presence of a rigid amorphous layer on the surface of particles. However, at the sintering temperature of 550 °C, the crystallization and the fragmentation of the layer occurred that yielded a better densification.

Elastic Buckling at the Scale of a Bone Trabecula: The Influence of the Boundary Conditions

Trabecular fatigue fractures are observed as compressive stress fractures in the proximal femur, vertebrae, calcaneus and tibia. These fractures are often preceded by buckling and bending of microstructural elements. But the etiology of these bone fractures is still poorly understood in biomechanical perspective. In the present work, it comes to predicting the buckling mechanism trabeculae in progress remodeling bone and in function of the boundary conditions without experimental data.

Overall Mechanical Properties of Particulate Porous Composites Following Two-Step Homogenization Scheme

The present work tries to make an attempt to improve previous work which offers a simple but effective way to construct satisfied predicating model. Indeed, recent work due to Peng et al. [13] and dealing with a two-step homogenization scheme is revisited here by introducing an iterative process which allows us to take into account differently the porosity of the elastic media. Several homogenization schemes (dilute, Mori-Tanaka, self-consistent ...) are presented and compared with experimental data. One can say that the current approach provides reasonably accurate predictions for the effective moduli of multiphase composites without using the n parameter as proposed by Peng et al. [13]