PSI - Issue 26

Jesús Toribio et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 26 (2020) 354–359 Toribio / Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

355

2

2. From fracture to structural integrity: A historical perspective In Europe, the classical concept of fracture , as well as the European Group on Fracture (EGF, 1987) evolved (EGF, 1989) towards the newer concept of structural integrity thirty years ago (EGF, 1990), so that a new name was coined as European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS), formerly the European Group on Fracture (EGF). Those years many discussions were held about the change of name. From the beginning, a consensus was established about the necessity of changing the name group to the more adequate society and about the convenience of avoiding negative terms like fracture (EGF, 1989; 1990). However, long-standing debate was maintained about whether (or not) the term “material” should be included in the name of the new society. Finally it wa s agreed that a broader general term like “structure” was quite more adequate (EGF, 1989; 1990). In recent years, ESIS has developed a very important and intense activity with the European Conference on Fracture every two years (ESIS, 2014) and Workshops of the Technical Committees (TC). As an example, the TC10 Committee of Environmentally Assisted Cracking (Chairman: Professor Dr. Jesús Toribio) together with a Sub Committee on Hydrogen Embrittlement/Degradation (Chairman: Professor Dr. Hryhoriy Nykyforchyn), organize scientific meetings in the form of Workshops on Environmentally Assisted Cracking and Hydrogen Embrittlement (ESIS, 2015a; 2015b). With regard to National Groups, the pioneering example is Italy where metallurgy meetings were held during the 7 0’s under the auspices of the Italian Metallurgy Association ( Associazione Italiana di Metallurgia ), until 1982 when the Italian Group on Fracture (IGF, Gruppo Italiano Frattura ) was founded (Firrao, 2013). In 1990, Professor Donato Firrao, then IGF President, organized the very successful 8 th European Conference on Fracture (ECF8) at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. In the world, the International Congress on Fracture (ICF) was created through the vision of Takeo Yokobori in Sendai (Japan) in 1965 (Taplin and Saxena, 2011). The innovative concept of structural integrity was launched in 2011 during the meeting of the ICF Executive Committee (ICF ExCo) held in Anaheim (USA) in May 2011 (Fig. 1), as reported by Carpinteri et al. (2011), when a new global brand descriptor of the ICF society was proposed as follows: “The International Congress on Fracture: The World Academy of Structural Integrity” (ICF -WASI) and encompassing the concept of structural integrity in its widest possible meaning in an ever-changing community (Taplin and Saxena, 2011).

Fig. 1. Pictures of the meeting held in May 2011 in Anaheim (USA) of the International Congress of Fracture Executive Committee (ICF ExCo). Attendees: Alberto Carpinteri, David Taplin, Shouwen Yu, Mimoun Elboujdaini, Ravi Chona, Takashi Kuriyama, Susanne Bachofer, Paul Paris, Michael Schaper and Jesús Toribio. Two years later, in 2013, during the 13 th International Conference on Fracture (ICF13, 2013), held during June 16-21, 2013 in Beijing (China), the ICF-WASI concept was not finally approved by the ICF Council. Nevertheless, fruitful discussions were held about the convenience (or not) of including the term “material” (in contrast to the word “structure”) in the new glob al brand descriptor of the ICF society.