Toward proactive engineering: Lessons from damage studies

Abstract A review of damage studies and their spin-off toward proactive engineering is given from a viewpoint of artifactual engineering. Introductions of in situ observation infrastructures strongly promoted by S. Ishino and other people are not simply to get new information on heavy irradiation and consequent synergistic effects, but also to invoke a shift in the way of expert thinking about materials complexities from empirical cognition on observed facts into reflective cognition on each fact. This shift results in a shift from phenomenological and independent descriptions of observed facts by each researcher into physico-based and associated descriptions of each fact by many researchers. It navigates damage studies in a direction beyond the observations of the complexities into establishing modeling methodologies on each complex problem. As a spin-off of such studies a new way of engineering is proposed toward proactive rather than reactive solutions against failures and for design.