Editorial

Excerpt

Promoting next-generation materials to improve fuel economy and enhance performance under extreme conditions is a pivotal challenge currently facing the materials community. The recent effort to incorporate new aluminum, magnesium, steel, and titanium alloys has had a considerable impact throughout the oil, gas, and transportation (automobile and aerospace) industries. In general, introduction of new materials into existing systems can be an expensive and time-consuming process, which often requires new forming protocols and/or numerous design iterations to achieve the desired properties. Because they can effectively mitigate some of the development issues, numerical formability predictions have become integral components in the development process. However, the accuracy of these complex models is highly dependent on the quality of the property data used, and for many of these new alloys, such data can be quite limited. The inconsistencies that still frequently arise between the predicted behavior and what is actually observed have precipitated an industry-wide demand for more accurate and reliable characterizations of the mechanical behavior of new alloys under a wide range of conditions. …