List of Mini Symposiums
The below listed Mini Symposiums are now accepted and have been added to the themes of the Abstract Submission Portal. New Mini Symposiums can be submitted here.
Title | Chair | Co-Organisers | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
MS: Advanced Fracture Mechanics: Emerging Computational, Experimental and Data-Driven Approaches for Industrial Applications | Dr. -Ing. Guoyu Lin, Ansys, Part of Synopsys | Dr. -Ing. Habil. Michael Kaliske, Technical University Dresden Dr. Emmanouil Kakouris, University of Warwick Dr. Lampros D., University of Vermont Dr. Fatemeh Azhari, Monash University Dr. Dylan Agius, | Fracture mechanics is advancing rapidly through developments in computational modelling, experimental characterization, and data-driven methodologies. Emerging approaches, including phase-field and cohesive-zone formulations, nonlocal methods such as peridynamics, and physics-informed machine learning techniques, are enhancing the prediction of damage initiation, crack propagation, and structural failure assessment in engineering systems. At the same time, advanced experimental methods are providing new insights into fracture processes and generating data for model development, calibration, and validation.
Despite these advances, significant challenges remain in integrating experimental observations with predictive models, establishing robust validation strategies, quantifying uncertainty, and translating advanced methodologies into practical engineering tools. Addressing these challenges is essential for improving confidence in fracture predictions and accelerating industrial adoption of advanced fracture assessment technologies.
This mini-symposium will bring together researchers, software developers, and engineering practitioners working at the intersection of computational fracture mechanics, experimental characterization, and engineering applications. Particular emphasis will be placed on approaches that improve physical understanding, predictive capability, and confidence in fracture simulations, while facilitating their deployment in engineering practice.
The symposium aims to strengthen links between modelling, experiments, and applications; foster collaboration between academia and industry; and identify key research directions for the next generation of reliable and deployable fracture assessment methodologies. Indicative themes include: 1.Advanced computational methods for fracture and damage 2.Experimental characterization for model development and validation 3.Integrated computational-experimental approaches 4.AI and data-driven methods for fracture modelling and prediction 5.Verification, validation, uncertainty quantification, and industrial translation of predictive fracture models |
MS: Defects and Residual stress influence on fatigue fracturing processes in metallic materials | Dr. Enrico Salvati, Polytechnic Department of Engineering and Architecture (DPIA), University of Udine | Prof. Andrea Tridello, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Politecnico di Torino | Fracture processes are primarily initiated at the microstructural scale, especially under high- and very-high-cycle fatigue (HCF/VHCF) conditions. At this level, microstructural inhomogeneities dictate the structural integrity and overall performance of engineering components.
This symposium addresses the critical influence of defects and residual stresses on fatigue behaviour. While defects are conventionally viewed as detrimental, particularly during crack initiation, they can, under certain mechanisms, play a beneficial role, such as acting as crack arresters. Conversely, the impact of residual stresses depends heavily on their nature: tensile stresses compromise performance, while compressive stresses enhance fatigue life by shifting the mean stress into safer regimes. Characterising these features involves a complex mix of destructive and non-destructive experimental methods. However, multi-scale quantification remains a challenge, especially regarding residual stresses and their "hidden" nature. Parallel to this, while predicting the occurrence of defects and residual stress, and their subsequent fatigue impact, has advanced rapidly, several fundamental mechanisms remain unresolved, regardless of the nature of the studied metallic material. The primary objective of this symposium is to map the latest breakthroughs in this domain and establish an international forum to chart future research directions. |
MS: Energy-Based Approaches for Fatigue Characterization and Structural Integrity Assessment | Energy-based approaches are increasingly recognised as a powerful scientific framework for understanding fatigue and fracture, characterising material behaviour, and assessing structural integrity and service life. By relating irreversible energy dissipation to damage evolution, these methodologies provide physically meaningful alternatives and complements to conventional stress-, strain-, and fracture mechanics-based approaches. Moreover, energy offers a common physical metric linking material behaviour, damage accumulation and structural performance across different materials, geometries and loading conditions. This Mini-Symposium aims to bring together researchers and industrial practitioners working on experimental, theoretical, numerical and data-driven methodologies for fatigue characterisation and structural integrity assessment. Topics include infrared thermography, thermoelastic stress analysis, dissipated energy methods, strain energy density, thermodynamic and entropy-based models, energy release concepts, rapid fatigue characterisation, and hybrid methodologies integrating full-field measurements, computational modelling and artificial intelligence. Contributions addressing metals, composites, polymers, additively manufactured materials, welded structures, biomaterials and engineering components are welcome, covering fatigue damage, crack initiation, service life prediction, structural health monitoring and industrial applications. By promoting dialogue between experimental mechanics, computational modelling, thermodynamics and engineering practice, this Mini-Symposium aims to strengthen the international community working on energy-based approaches, fostering collaboration and a common scientific framework for future research. The proposed topic aligns with the conference theme “Structural Integrity for Sustainability & Circular Economy”, highlighting methodologies that reduce experimental effort, material consumption and development time while improving the reliability, sustainability and resource efficiency of engineering structures. | ||
MS: Failure Analysis in Transportation Accident Investigations | Dr. Erik M. Mueller, National Transportation Safety Board | Dr. Emily Frain, Australian Transport Safety Bureau Dr. Matthew Fox, University of Warwick | The principles of failure analysis are used in a variety of industries, but in few is it as critical as that of transportation. Whether it is people or freight, safe and reliable transportation is crucial to the functioning and sustainability of society. Due to the complexity and interconnectedness of major transportation accidents, many governments have established specialized agencies dedicated to investigating, resolving, and preventing such incidents. These investigations employ the principles of failure analysis to identify the root and proximal causes, informing actions to prevent their recurrence and ensure public safety. Whether the mode of transportation is air, space, rail, marine, highway, or pipeline, failure analysis is necessary to understand the mechanisms leading to an accident and to develop the proper solutions. This symposium will highlight major international accident investigations, focusing on applied failure analysis techniques, from atomic-level materials mechanisms to the systematic human decisions that drive the process. |
MS: FAS Joint Session on Applied Failure Analysis and Prevention | Mr. Pierre Dupont, UMONS Mr. Robert O'Shea, Applied Materials Technologies, Inc. | The principles of failure analysis are used in a variety of industries, but in few is it as critical as that of transportation. Whether it is people or freight, safe and reliable transportation is crucial to the functioning and sustainability of society. Due to the complexity and interconnectedness of major transportation accidents, many governments have established specialized agencies dedicated to investigating, resolving, and preventing such incidents. These investigations employ the principles of failure analysis to identify the root and proximal causes, informing actions to prevent their recurrence and ensure public safety. Whether the mode of transportation is air, space, rail, marine, highway, or pipeline, failure analysis is necessary to understand the mechanisms leading to an accident and to develop the proper solutions. This symposium will highlight major international accident investigations, focusing on applied failure analysis techniques, from atomic-level materials mechanisms to the systematic human decisions that drive the process. | |
MS: Fatigue Crack Growth Thresholds and Short Crack Behaviour: From Mechanisms to Structural Integrity Assessment | Dr. -Ing. Karl Michael Kraemer, Technical University Darmstadt | Dr. Mauro Madia | Fatigue crack growth thresholds and short crack behaviour remain central challenges in fracture mechanics and structural integrity assessment. While long-crack threshold concepts are widely used in damage-tolerant design, their transferability to small, short, and microstructurally short cracks is limited. Short cracks can propagate below conventional long-crack threshold values, show strong sensitivity to microstructure, environment, load ratio, crack closure, residual stresses, and surface condition, and may dominate fatigue life in high-performance engineering components.
This mini-symposium aims to bring together experimental, theoretical, and computational contributions addressing the transition from short to long fatigue crack growth, the determination and interpretation of crack growth thresholds, crack arrest phenomena, and the integration of short-crack concepts into lifetime assessment methods. Topics may include threshold testing methodologies, cyclic R-curve approaches, Kitagawa–Takahashi-type assessments, crack closure and effective driving force concepts, microstructure-sensitive crack propagation, environmental effects, high-temperature fatigue crack growth, additive manufacturing-related defects and surface conditions, and probabilistic or mechanistic modelling approaches.
The symposium is intended to foster discussion between researchers working on fundamental crack growth mechanisms and engineers developing robust assessment procedures for safety-critical components in aerospace, energy, transportation, and advanced manufacturing. Particular emphasis will be placed on bridging the gap between laboratory threshold data, physically meaningful short-crack descriptions, and practical design or standardization concepts. |
MS: Fracture in Discrete and Complex Materials: Disorder, Architecture, and Multiscale Failure | Prof. David Kammer, ETH Zurich Prof. Luc St-Pierre, Aalto University | Discrete and complex materials — granular media, fiber and cellular networks, lattice-based and additively manufactured metamaterials, composites, biological and bio-inspired hierarchical solids, and disordered or amorphous matter — fail in ways that classical continuum fracture mechanics was not designed to capture. Discreteness, structural disorder, heterogeneity across scales, and long-range or nonlocal interactions give rise to diffuse damage and crack nucleation in random media, statistical size effects, rough and intermittent crack growth, and architecture-controlled toughening. Predicting failure in these systems is increasingly urgent as engineered metamaterials, 3D-printed lattices, and bio-inspired composites transition from the laboratory to structural, biomedical, and energy applications.
This mini-symposium brings together mechanicians, physicists, materials scientists, and applied mathematicians working on crack initiation and propagation in discrete and complex media. Contributions are invited on discrete and lattice models, the discrete element method, peridynamics and nonlocal theories, the statistical physics of fracture, molecular and multiscale simulation, and in-situ experimental techniques such as X-ray tomography and digital image correlation. A central aim is to confront discrete and continuum descriptions of failure and to identify unifying principles — scaling laws, criticality, and the roles of disorder and topology — governing toughness and reliability across material classes. By gathering complementary modelling and experimental perspectives, the symposium seeks to sharpen predictive failure theories and inform the design of damage-tolerant architected and complex materials. | |
MS: Heterogeneity and Fracture: Mechanisms Across Ordered and Disordered Multi-phase Solids | Dr. Ashwij Mayya, Tortoise S.A.S Dr. Rajesh Ravindran, Institute of Mathematical Sciences | Fracture in multiphase solids spans a wide range of material systems, from engineered fiber-reinforced composites and architected materials to naturally occurring and structural materials such as bone and concrete. Despite their diversity in composition and length scales, these materials exhibit strikingly similar fracture phenomena, including crack deflection, interfacial debonding, damage localization, and transitions between stable and unstable crack growth. These observations suggest the existence of underlying common principles governing fracture in heterogeneous media. Recent advances in experimental characterization and computational modeling have enabled new insights into how microstructural architecture influences fracture processes. In ordered multiphase systems such as fiber-reinforced composites, fracture is strongly governed by designed interfaces and controlled load transfer mechanisms. In contrast, disordered materials such as concrete exhibit emergent toughening mechanisms arising from statistical heterogeneity and random crack-bridging processes. Bridging these two regimes is central to the materials genomics paradigm, which seeks to establish structure–property relationships across material classes, and remains an open challenge in fracture mechanics. This mini-symposium aims to bring together researchers working on experimental, computational, and theoretical aspects of fracture in multiphase solids to identify unifying mechanisms governing crack initiation and propagation. Contributions are invited on multiscale modeling, network-based and phase-field approaches, data-driven methods for fracture prediction, and experimental techniques including X-ray tomography, digital image correlation, thermal imaging, acoustic emission, and related in situ characterization methods. By integrating perspectives from engineered composites, geomaterials, and biological analogues, the symposium seeks to advance a unified mechanics framework for fracture in heterogeneous materials. | |
MS: Impact Fatigue, Dynamic Fracture and Failure of Metallic and Composite Materials | Prof. Tao Suo, National University of Singapore Associate Prof. Xudong Qian | Metallic alloys and composite materials are increasingly employed in aerospace, transportation, offshore, energy, and defense structures where accidental impact, repeated impact, blast, and other high-rate loading conditions can govern structural integrity and service life. Recent advances in experimental diagnostics, multiscale modeling, computational mechanics, and data-driven approaches have significantly improved our understanding of dynamic fracture and impact fatigue. Nevertheless, many challenges remain in characterizing failure mechanisms across multiple length and time scales and in translating these advances into reliable engineering design. This symposium focuses on the behavior of metallic alloys and composite materials under high strain-rate impact loading. This symposium aims to bring together researchers from academia and industry to present latest experimental, theoretical, and computational advances in dynamic fracture and impact fatigue, to facilitate knowledge exchange and collaboration among researchers and industry experts, and to identify key challenges and future research directions in the field. The following topics are included but not limited to •Experimental techniques for high strain-rate testing and fracture characterization •Theoretical, numerical and multiscale modeling for impact fatigue, crack initiation and crack propagation •Dynamic behavior of metals, composites, and hybrid structures •Microstructure effects, crack propagation, and failure under impact, blast and crash loading •Applications in aerospace, transportation, energy, offshore, defense, and protective structures Data-driven methods, additive-manufactured materials, and sustainable composites | |
MS: Laser Shock Peening and Advanced Surface Engineering for Structural Integrity | Dr. Yuji Sano, The University Of Osaka | Dr.Niroj Maharjan, Swinburne University of Technology Dr. Kiyotaka Masaki, Saitama Institute of Technology | Surface engineering technologies play an increasingly important role in enhancing structural integrity and extending the service life of engineering components across a wide range of industrial sectors. Among them, laser shock peening (LSP) has emerged as an advanced surface treatment capable of introducing beneficial compressive residual stresses, enhancing fatigue performance, delaying crack initiation and propagation, and improving resistance to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) with minimal thermal effects.
This Mini-Symposium aims to provide an international forum for presenting the latest advances in laser shock peening and related surface engineering technologies that contribute to structural integrity throughout the life cycle of engineering structures. Contributions are invited on fundamental mechanisms, residual stress characterization, fatigue and fracture behaviour, process modelling and simulation, additive manufacturing, welding and repair, life extension of engineering structures, as well as industrial applications in aerospace, energy, transportation, infrastructure, and other critical sectors.
The symposium will also encourage discussions on emerging trends in advanced laser-based surface engineering, digital manufacturing, and maintenance technologies that support structural integrity for sustainability and the circular economy. By bringing together researchers from academia, research institutes, and industry, the symposium aims to promote interdisciplinary collaboration and identify future research directions in advanced surface engineering. |
MS: Length Scale Effects on Fracture and Damage: A Mini-Symposium in Honor of Professor Vikram Jayaram | Dr. Praveen Kumar, Indian Institute of Science | Dr. Ankur Chauhan, Indian Institute of Science Dr. Nagamani Balila Dr. Dong (Liily) Liu Dr. Bernd Gludovatz, University of New South Wales Dr. Jaafar El-Awady, John Hopkins University | Fracture and damage are strongly influenced by characteristic length scales associated with microstructure, defects, deformation mechanisms, crack-tip processes, and specimen dimensions. When these intrinsic and extrinsic length scales become comparable, measured fracture and damage responses may depart significantly from conventional bulk behavior, giving rise to pronounced size and length scale effects. Understanding the origins of these effects and their implications for characterizing and predicting material behavior remains a fundamental challenge in fracture mechanics and materials science. This mini-symposium will bring together experimentalists and computational researchers working on length scale effects in fracture and damage. Topics will include, but are not limited to: (i) micro-and meso-scale fracture, fatigue, and creep testing under diverse environments; (ii) specimen, geometry, and microstructural size effects; (iii) microstructure-sensitive damage initiation and crack propagation; (iv) fracture, fatigue, and creep of thin films, coatings, interfaces, and layered systems; (v) statistical and weakest-link effects; and (vi) the coupling of plasticity, damage, and fracture across multiple length scales. The symposium will also encompass experimental and modeling approaches that bridge local mechanisms with macroscopic material and structural response. The mini-symposium is proposed in honor of Professor Vikram Jayaram (Department of Materials Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru), whose pioneering contributions to small-scale mechanical testing and the understanding of deformation and fracture across length scales have significantly advanced the fields of fracture, failure and related microstructural aspects. By bringing together researchers from diverse domains, the symposium aims to stimulate new experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches for understanding and predicting fracture and damage. |
MS: Thermomechanical Fatigue of Advanced Materials: Damage, Deformation, Modelling, and Life Prediction Across Scales | Dr. Ivo Šulák, Institute Of Physics Of Materials, Czech Academy of Sciences | Thermomechanical fatigue (TMF) remains one of the most severe and least tractable damage modes limiting the life of high-temperature structural components in gas turbines, aero-engines, automotive exhaust and powertrain systems, nuclear plants, and next-generation concentrated solar and hydrogen energy hardware. Unlike isothermal fatigue, TMF couples cyclic mechanical loading with simultaneously varying temperature, producing interacting deformation mechanisms, including plasticity, creep, oxidation, and phase transformation, whose relative contributions shift continuously through each cycle. This interaction makes TMF life prediction, microstructural damage characterisation, and constitutive modelling substantially more challenging than conventional fatigue assessment, and existing design methodologies often rely on conservative empirical correlations rather than mechanism-based understanding. This mini-symposium will bring together researchers and industry practitioners working across the full spectrum of TMF research. On the experimental side, contributions might range from TMF testing to in-situ synchrotron and neutron diffraction studies that track microstructural evolution. On the mechanistic side, a talk on creep-fatigue-oxidation interaction in a Ni-based superalloy sits naturally alongside one on short-crack initiation in an additively manufactured steel, since both speak to how damage actually accumulates under coupled thermal and mechanical load. Modelling contributions are equally welcome, whether the approach is a physically motivated crystal-plasticity model or a more design-oriented energy-based life-prediction correlation. The symposium is meant to put different modelling philosophies in the same room. We are also keen to include work motivated by decarbonization in hydrogen-compatible alloys. Overall, the session is designed to surface open challenges in the field and spark new collaborations between experimentalists and modellers. |
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