Cumulative energy demand has been used as a methodology to assess life cycle environmental impacts of commodity production since the early seventies, but has also been criticized because it focuses on energy only. During the past 30 years there has been much research into the development of more complex single-score life cycle impact assessment methodologies. However, a comprehensive analysis o...

At low temperatures, monolithic bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) exhibit high strength and large elasticity limits. On the other hand, BMGs lack overall ductility due to highly localized deformation mechanisms. Recent experimental findings suggest that the problem of catastrophic failure by shear band propagation in BMGs can be mitigated by tailoring microstructural features at different length sca...

Metals can be processed to reach ultra-high strength, but usually at a drastic loss of ductility. Here, we review recent advances in overcoming this tradeoff, by purposely deploying heterogeneous nanostructures in an otherwise single-phase metal. Several structural designs are being explored, including bimodal, harmonic, lamellar, gradient, domain-dispersed, and hierarchical nanostructures. The...

Layered Ti-Al metal composite (LMC) fabricated by hot-pressing and hot-rolling process displays higher ductility than that of both components. In this paper, a combination of digital image correlation (DIC) and X-ray tomography revealed that strain delocalization and constrained crack distribution are the origin of extraordinary tensile ductility. Strain delocalization was derived from the tran...

The processing of metals through the application of severe plastic deformation (SPD) techniques provides the potential for achieving exceptional grain refinement leading to ultrafine-grained (UFG) materials in bulk solids. These materials generally exhibit high strength but very limited ductility at room temperature (RT) leading to the so-called paradox of strength and ductility. The recent dev...

A new methodology is proposed to simulate accelerogram which is compatible to both linear and nonlinear design spectra. For this purpose, a wavelet-based parametric characterization of earthquake accelerogram is adopted and the parameters are optimized to tune its non-stationary features. A modified form of L-P basis is considered for wavelet transform which has the unique feature to decompose ...