We investigate the effects of roughness and fractality on the normal contact stiffness of rough surfaces. Samples of isotropically roughened aluminium surfaces are considered. The roughness and fractal dimension were altered through blasting using di
fferent sized particles. Subsequently, surface mechanical attrition treatment (SMAT) was applied to the surfaces in order to modify the surface at the microscale. The surface topology was characterised by interferometry based profilometry. The normal contact stiffness was measured through nanoindentation with a flat tip utilising the partial unloading method. We focus on establishing the relationships between surface stiffness and roughness, combined with the effects of fractal dimension. The experimental results, for a wide range of surfaces, showed that the measured contact stiffness depended very closely on surfaces root mean squared (RMS) slope and their fractal dimension, with correlation coefficients of around 90%, whilst a relatively weak correlation coefficient of 57% was found between the contact stiffness and RMS roughness.
Due to neutron irradiation, solid breeder blankets are subjected to complex thermo-mechanical conditions. Within one breeder unit, the ceramic breeder bed is composed of spherical-shaped lithium orthosilicate pebbles, and as a type of granular materi
al, it exhibits strong coupling between temperature and stress fields. In this paper, we study these thermo-mechanical problems by developing a thermal discrete element method (Thermal-DEM). This proposed simulation tool models each individual ceramic pebble as one element and considers grain-scale thermo-mechanical interactions between elements. A small section of solid breeder pebble bed in HCPB is modelled using thousands of individual pebbles and subjected to volumetric heating profiles calculated from neutronics under ITER-relevant conditions. We consider heat transfer at the grain-scale between pebbles through both solid-to-solid contacts and the interstitial gas phase, and we calculate stresses arising from thermal expansion of pebbles. The overall effective conductivity of the bed depends on the resulting compressive stress state during the neutronic heating. The thermal-DEM method proposed in this study provides the access to the grain-scale information, which is beneficial for HCPB design and breeder material optimization, and a better understanding of overall thermo-mechanical responses of the breeder units under fusion-relevant conditions.
