Ravi Yellavajjala
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering·Early-career
Large steel castings, single cast pieces of steel used to join the parts of a building's frame, can make steel buildings lighter, faster to erect, and highly resistant to earthquakes and blasts. Many of these castings are huge and geometrically complex.
- Fields
Engineering
Materials Science
Computer Science
- Topics
structural steel castings
additive manufacturing
3D printing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Produce 3D-printed reduced-scale models of structural steel castings that match full-size parts in geometry and material strength, using data-driven selection of printing process and build parameters plus post-print heat treatments.
- Derive scaling relationships for strength, crack-initiation strain, and life under ultra-low cycle fatigue, the failure that follows a few large earthquake-like load cycles, between printed models and full-scale steel castings.
- Train a deep neural network on numerically generated fracture data from realistic metal microstructures so it learns how fatigue damage in small printed models translates to full-scale castings.
- Validate the scaling approach by imaging microscopic fatigue damage with x-ray tomography and by structurally testing two full-scale cast steel components under seismic loading.
More about the research
Testing them at full size takes sprawling facilities and expensive equipment, so engineers rarely do it. As a result, designers cannot use these castings to their full potential. One alternative is to test small-scale copies. The challenge is making sure a small copy really behaves like the full-size part, especially when it cracks and breaks under repeated earthquake shaking.
Why it matters
By letting engineers run many inexpensive tests on small printed models instead of a few costly full-size tests, this work could support design guidelines for structural steel castings. Building designers could then use castings more widely in earthquake-resistant steel structures. The grant notes this could expand U.S. casting manufacturing and reduce construction's carbon footprint.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Tara Hutchinson
University of California-San Diego, CA·Engineering
Test individual wall lines and building components of cold-formed steel framing to separate how designated shear walls, gravity walls, finishes and partitions each resist earthquake loads.
Jun Li
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University-Daytona Beach, FL·Engineering
Develop direct mesoscale simulations of 3D printing that couple heat, mechanical forces, chemistry and fluid-structure interactions, to show how temperature gradients and melting between filaments and reinforcing fibers lead to micro-cracks.
Matthew Bandelt
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Quantify plastic hinge response, how bending zones absorb energy, of HPFRCC components under combined axial load and bending through physical experiments and detailed computer simulations.
The school
Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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