Computational modeling of materials processing and processes

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Anisotropic mechanical properties of densified BSCCO powders are of paramount importance during thermo-mechanical processing of superconducting tapes and wires. Maximum current transport requires high relative density and a high degree of alignment of the single crystal planes of the BSCCO. Unfortunately this configuration causes high stresses that can lead to cracking, and thus reduce the density, and the conductive properties of the tape. The current work develops a micromechanical material mode to model is calibrated and compared to experimental results, and then employed to analyze the effects of initial texture and confinement pressure and shear strains in the core of oxide powder-in-tube (OPIT) processed tapes are calculated by finite-element analysis. The calculated deformations were then applied as boundary conditions to the micromechanical model. Our calculated results were used to interpret a set of prototypical rolling experiments. 11 refs., 5 figs