Internship - R&D Engineer Modeling damage nucleation and growth in recycled aluminium alloys F/H/X

C-TEC RECRUTE  

INTERNSHIP - R&D ENGINEER F/H/X

Constellium is a global leader designing and manufacturing innovative and high value-added aluminum products and solutions for a broad range of applications dedicated primarily to aerospace, automotive and packaging markets. Constellium Technology Center (C-TEC) based in Grenoble (Voreppe - 38) is Constellium’ s European research center with 246 employees and 20 nationalities.

PROJECT TITLE : Modeling damage nucleation and growth in recycled aluminium alloys

Context : 
Due to its low density, aluminium (Al) is a key material for sustainability as it allows lightweighting. In order to decrease the CO2 emissions associated with its production, it is required to massively use recycled aluminium, meaning remelting Al scrap to make new ingots. However, switching from primary synthesis (bauxite reduction) to secondary synthesis (scrap melting) often leads to increasing impurities, the main one being iron in aluminium. Such contaminants may impact the performance of the current alloys in terms of ductility/formability because they form brittle intermetallic particles within the aluminium matrix.
On the one hand, Constellium research center and Centre des Matériaux laboratory (Mines Paris - PSL) currently collaborate for a PhD work aiming at characterizing the link between damage development and intermetallics-related features (size, nature, spatial distribution…). For this, in-situ nano-tomography experiments at the synchrotron have been performed on different microstructures to simultaneously image voids and particles evolution while straining.    On the other hand, a cellular automaton model based on a micromechanical description of damage nucleation, growth and coalescence has been proposed some years ago by researchers at the Catholic University of Louvain (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actamat.2015.10.008). It is able to consider a large number of particles with their distribution of position, size and void nucleation stress and predicts the fracture strain. 
 
Ojectives : 
The objective of the project is to test and validate the model on newly generated nano-tomography data for 6xxx alloys for automotive applications and if needed, implement upgrades to better capture the observed mechanisms.

The project has several components :

• Literature review on failure mechanisms and existing modeling strategies.
• Post-treatment of nano-tomography scans to extract input data for the model.
• Building of the initial representative volume element (RVE) to correctly describe the multi-phase materials of interest.
• Test of the existing model and identification of potential discrepancies vs. experimental observations.
• Proposal and implementation of improvements to the model (better description of some physical mechanisms, additional features for both inputs and outputs).
• Comparison between simulation and experimental results in terms of fracture strain and location of damage initiation.
• Synthesis of the results, report writing and presentation to the team.
• Transfer to the industrial R&D center and training of engineers to use it.

The intern will be based in the laboratory of Centre des Matériaux, Mines Paris - PSL in the Paris region (Versailles). However, frequent interactions with the industrial partner will take place together with technical exchanges with other cutting-edge academic modeling teams (UCL in Belgium, CEMEF in France) with experience in the ductile failure topic.

Profile : 

Education level: Engineering school or Master of Science

Competencies & technical & soft skills requirement :

• Good knowledge in mechanics
• Knowledge in physical metallurgy is a plus
• Motivation for numerical work
• Strong capacity to post-treat a significant amount of data from both simulations and experiments
• Serious, autonomy, critical mind and creativity
• Ability to interact with both academic and industrial partners
• Interest for research and development type of work
• Good level of the English language (both written and spoken)