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American Society for Testing and Materials

Brittle failure of components weakened by cracks or sharp and blunt V-notches is a topic of active and continuous research. It is attractive for all researchers who face the problem of fracture of materials under different loading conditions and deals with a large number of applications in different engineering fields, not only with the mechanical one. This topic is significant in all the cases where intrinsic defects of the material or geometrical discontinuities give rise to localized stress concentration which, in brittle materials, may generate a crack leading to catastrophic failure or to a shortening of the assessed structural life. Whereas cracks are viewed as unpleasant entities in most engineering materials, U- and V-notches of different acuities are sometimes deliberately introduced in design and manufacturing of structural components. Dealing with brittle failure of notched components and summarizing some recent experimental results reported in the literature, the main aim of the present contribution is to present a review of some local approaches applicable near stress raisers both sharp and blunt. The reviewed criteria allowed the present authors to develop a new approach based on the volume strain energy density (SED), which has been recently applied to assess the brittle failure of a large number of materials. The main features of the SED approach are outlined in the paper and its peculiarities and advantages accurately underlined. Some examples of applications are reported, as well. The present review is based on the authors’ experience over more than 15 years and the contents of their personal library. It is not a dispassionate literature survey.

Recent developments in brittle and quasi-brittle failure assessment of engineering materials by means of local approaches

An improved semi-circular bend specimen for investigating mixed mode brittle fracture

Additive manufacturing of industrially-relevant high-performance parts and products is today a reality, especially for metal additive manufacturing technologies. The design complexity that is now possible makes it particularly useful to improve product performance in a variety of applications. Metal additive manufacturing is especially well matured and is being used for production of end-use mission-critical parts. The next level of this development includes the use of intentionally designed porous metals - architected cellular or lattice structures. Cellular structures can be designed or tailored for specific mechanical or other performance characteristics and have numerous advantages due to their large surface area, low mass, regular repeated structure and open interconnected pore spaces. This is considered particularly useful for medical implants and for lightweight automotive and aerospace components, which are the main industry drivers at present. Architected cellular structures behave similar to open cell foams, which have found many other industrial applications to date, such as sandwich panels for impact absorption, radiators for thermal management, filters or catalyst materials, sound insulation, amongst others. The advantage of additively manufactured cellular structures is the precise control of the micro-architecture which becomes possible. The huge potential of these porous architected cellular materials manufactured by additive manufacturing is currently limited by concerns over their structural integrity. This is a valid concern, when considering the complexity of the manufacturing process, and the only recent maturation of metal additive manufacturing technologies. Many potential manufacturing errors can occur, which have so far resulted in a widely disparate set of results in the literature for these types of structures, with especially poor fatigue properties often found. These have improved over the years, matching the maturation and improvement of the metal additive manufacturing processes. As the causes of errors and effects of these on mechanical properties are now better understood, many of the underlying issues can be removed or mitigated. This makes additively manufactured cellular structures a highly valid option for disruptive new and improved industrial products. This review paper discusses the progress to date in the improvement of the fatigue performance of cellular structures manufactured by additive manufacturing, especially metal-based, providing insights and a glimpse to the future for fatigue-tolerant additively manufactured architected cellular materials.

Architected cellular materials: A review on their mechanical properties towards fatigue-tolerant design and fabrication

A review of T-stress and its effects in fracture mechanics

Brittle fracture in rounded-tip V-shaped notches

Tensile fracture in notched polycrystalline graphite specimens

Ductile commercial steel was equated from the viewpoint of strain energy density with a virtual brittle material of the same elastic modulus by using a novel concept, called the equivalent material concept (EMC). By determining the ultimate tensile strength of the virtual material and also, by assuming that the values of the plane–strain fracture toughness for real and virtual materials are equal, the tensile load-bearing capacity of several V-notched samples of steel reported in literature was theoretically estimated by using the mean stress (MS) criterion as a well-known brittle fracture theory. It was found that the theoretical results of the MS-EMC criterion for the imaginary brittle specimens are in a very good consistency with the experimental results reported for real steel samples.

Ali Reza Torabi

Papers

Brittle fracture in rounded-tip V-shaped notches

Tensile fracture in notched polycrystalline graphite specimens

Estimation of tensile load-bearing capacity of ductile metallic materials weakened by a V-notch: The equivalent material concept

Investigation of mixed mode brittle fracture in rounded-tip V-notched components

A criterion for brittle fracture in U-notched components under mixed mode loading