Aluminium is widely valued for its light weight, strength, durability, and exceptional recyclability—making it a cornerstone material for sustainable development and circular economy strategies. Unlike many materials, aluminium can be recycled repeatedly without loss of properties, enabling closed-loop material flows for green products across sectors such as construction, automotive, aerospace, offshore structures, and renewable energy.
 

his session will explore the evolving challenges and opportunities in recycled aluminium alloys, focusing on how increased alloying element concentrations from multiple recycling loops influence mechanical properties (strength, ductility, impact toughness), damage tolerance (fracture, fatigue, corrosion-fatigue), and environmental resistance (corrosion behaviour). Furthermore, the session will address how these compositional changes affect manufacturing processes, including casting, forming, extrusion, and joining technologies, and their implications for structural integrity and lifecycle performance.

Key topics include:

• Effect of impurity build-up and alloying variations on microstructure and performance.
• Corrosion, fatigue, and fracture behaviour of recycled aluminium alloys.
• Impact toughness and damage tolerance in demanding applications.Processing challenges: casting defects, formability, extrusion quality, and weldability.
• Recycling-oriented alloy design and optimization strategies for high-performance applications.

The occurrence of failures has a major impact on quality, production and environmental health and safety areas of human and industrial activity. Understanding, analyzing and preventing failures result undoubtedly in the reinforcement of expertise and deep knowledge that constitute significant contributors of continuous quality improvement and society benefit.  The scope of this session aims to address and report several paradigms and case studies, where the investigation of fracture and failure of materials and components lead to the exploration and understanding of the failure process as a series of logical/natural stages and interactions of microstructure, properties, processing and environmental/operation conditions, exhibiting a “cause-and-effect” type relationships. The study areas of the Session are mainly focused (but not limited) on critical industrial sectors, such as metallurgical, mining, chemical, manufacturing and automotive. 
The following (but not limited) representative topics are included in the

Session: 

1. Failure and microstructure relationships
2. Genesis of damage at nano-, micro- and meso-scale level
3. Fractography as failure investigation method
4. Texture-failure interactions  
5. Modeling of degradation processes with experimental validation
6. Failures in modern manufacturing
7. Innovative approaches in failure investigation and failure analysis (e.g. AI, machine learning, etc.)
8. Corrosion and environmentally assisted damage
9. Degradation of historical materials and components
10. Process based philosophy and lessons learned approach
     

Fracture-mechanical properties of materials in micro- and nanoscale dimensions have become an important area of fundamental research, including the development and introduction of new techniques for micro- and nanomechanical testing as well as for high-resolution 3D imaging of features in opaque objects. At the same time, there is an increasing need for industry to establish new risk-mitigation strategies based on the understanding of microcrack evolution at small length scales that can cause catastrophic failure in 3D-structured systems and materials, such as leading-edge integrated circuits, advanced battery electrodes, and composites. New design concepts for bio-inspired materials, crack-stop engineering, and the controlled steering of microcracks into regions with high fracture toughness will be discussed.

Sub-topics of the session will be:

• Materials design and modeling/simulation
• Micromechanical tests, microcrack growth, fatigue in metals and composites
• Microcrack imaging using microscopy and tomography techniques
• Interaction of microcracks with materials’ microstructure, energy dissipation mechanisms
• Controlled microcrack steering into toughened regions
• Design of crack-stop structures
• Size and microstructure-dependent metal plasticity
• Natural systems and bio-inspired materials.
   

Very often based on lessons learned from aircraft accidents, design methods and processes for compliance demonstration with applicable standards have been established that are able to increase the level of safety for the occupants of an aircraft. The topic of the session covers new solutions to the “classic” structural design aspects for crashworthiness, such as structural integrity and energy absorption characteristics of the airframe, efficient restraint systems, minimized environmental hazards from loose or sharp objects, and reduced post-crash hazards from fire, smoke and fumes. Beyond these traditional crashworthiness considerations, and in view of new trends in aircraft design, the session also includes novel features of innovative propulsion systems and propellants such as electrical, mechanical, chemical, and functional safety of electric power trains or fuel cells and the storage and on-board handling of hydrogen. Finally, the session is also open to operational aspects, for instance, recovery systems or human factors.
 

Most of engineering components can fail catastrophically in service due to surface degradation. The ever-increasing requirements for high performance, high productivity, high power efficiency, and low carbon footprint lead to more and more challenging service environments and pre-mature failure of industry parts and systems. This session will provide a platform for reviewing the recent progress in the development of innovative surface protection technologies, anticipating challenges and opportunities, and exploring future research directions in combating surface related failure through advanced surface engineering.   

This special session will delve into the latest breakthroughs in metal additive manufacturing, encompassing both fusion-based and solid-state techniques. We will explore technologies that rely on feedstock melting and material fusion, as well as those that induce bonding through kinetic energy and plastic deformation. Given the multidisciplinary nature of this subject, we will consider the impacts of process parameters, material responses, surface characteristics, microstructural aspects, and geometrical features. The applications of these technologies span across various sectors, including space, aerospace, automotive, building, and biomedical industries.

The goal of this session is to create an international platform for academic and industrial contributors to share ideas on recent innovations and advancements in various AM technologies, and to discuss future opportunities and applications. We welcome contributions from both experimental studies and numerical developments. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Cold spray additive manufacturing
• Binder-jet additive manufacturing
• Laser/Electron beam-powder bed additive manufacturing
• Directed Energy deposition technologies
• Post-processing technologies for additive manufacturing
• AM technologies for repair and geometrical restorations

We look forward to your participation and contributions to this exciting session.
 

The demand for lightweight, high-performance, and sustainable structures has driven a growing interest in hybrid and multi-material systems that strategically combine metals, polymers, and fibre-reinforced composites. This session focuses on the latest advances in the design, manufacturing, and characterisation of such structures, addressing challenges related to joining and interfaces, residual stress control, damage tolerance, and long-term durability. Contributions covering experimental and numerical approaches, hybrid joining techniques (adhesive bonding, welding, mechanical fastening), and integrated digital design methods are particularly welcome. The session also encourages works on multi-scale modelling, topology optimisation, and AI-assisted frameworks for the design and performance prediction of hybrid structures across aerospace, automotive, marine, and energy applications. The aim is to foster interdisciplinary discussion and collaboration toward next-generation lightweight, sustainable, and damage-tolerant structural solutions.