White etching crack (WEC) failure is distinct to classical fatigue and driven by the composition of lubricants under special loading conditions; for example, slippage and electricity. The white etching area (WEA) within WEC contains carbon supersaturated ferrite (bcc-iron) and carbides, with a size of a few nanometers. This article presents investigations supporting the hypothesis that WEC processes start within a failure-free period by successive accumulation of a structural distortion. This can be measured by acoustic emission. Failure statistics show a steep ascent in the Weibull diagram (ß values beyond 1) leading to the assumption that WEC processes start unsuspicious, as one would see as a failure-free period, but imply a hidden subsurface accumulation of material defects. It is suggested and supported by the evidence presented within this article that WEC is neither related to the presence of nonmetallic inclusions nor related to other impurities in the steel. Instead, the failure is a sequence and accumulation of plastic deformations in the microstructure. Within the SAE 52100 material as discussed in this article, this accumulation is located in the microstructure around cementite, seen in a turn of hard magnetization toward soft magnetization proven by Barkhausen noise measurements. This decay is caused by the plastic deformation of such domains. Distortions in the vicinity of a cementite first would lead to carbon supersaturation by diffusion processes and later to a plastic deformation of the carbides. In the end, the complete distorted region will release the accumulated energy by downsizing the microstructure toward WEC.

Experimental results show that heat-and mass-transfer processes in recirculating turbulent flows, which comprise several vortexes of the mean flow, are significantly influenced by low-frequency large scale flow oscillations. The large eddy simulation (LES) model reproduces with good conformity not only these oscillations together with the dynamics of the macroscopic coherent structure, but also the turbulent energy transfer. Numerical studies, presented in this article, confirm the possibility of using LES for successful simulation of heat-and mass-transfer processes in metallurgical applications.

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The focus is set on mesoscale modelling of permeability of real fabrics used in composite manufacturing. Of particular interest is the effect of expected perturbations from perfect geometries, such as fibre bundle crimp, on the permeability. To start with, variational methods are used to calculate the permeability of individual gaps between fibre bundles. Based on this study a network of unit cells is formed enabling studies of two-and three-dimensional flow through the structure. From such an analysis the overall permeability of an arbitrary distribution of unit cell permeabilities can be calculated. Here random and controlled distributions are simulated. The former is an approximate representation of a continuous strand mat and the latter may describe Non-Crimp Fabrics. The result is that for random distributions, the permeability decreases with the maximum variation in unit cell while for a controlled permeability distribution the overall permeability can as well increase as decrease depending on the type of perturbation. In both cases the type of flow: one-, two-or three-dimensional strongly influence on the quantitative result. Hence, for the type of fabrics studied, it is necessary to model the full 3D-flow through to get a correct permeability value.

Despite the ongoing debates on influence of hydrogen uptake and penetration in the steel, pulsed and extraordinary fatigue on white etching cracks (WEC) formation in bearing steel SAE52100, the present paper proposes an alternative hypothesis on electrothermal initiation of the WEC. The hypothesis points to differences between electrical and thermal properties of elements of steel microstructure that lead sequentially to redistribution of current, resistivity heating, thermal expansion and deformations of the carbide particle. Appearance of a nano-void is also predicted by the model in the cases of the martensite and the bainite structures. The model also predicts higher probability of the WEC formation for the bainitic steel.