Fracture toughness

About: Fracture toughness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 39642 publications have been published within this topic receiving 854338 citations.

Numerical investigation of 3-D constraint effects on brittle fracture in SE(B) and C(T) specimens

Abstract: Specimen size and geometry effects on cleavage fracture of ferritic steels tested in the ductile-to-brittle transition region remain an important technological impediment in industrial applications of fracture mechanics and in the on-going development of consensus fracture testing standards. This investigation employs 3-D nonllinear finite element analyses to conduct an extensive parametric evaluation of crack front stress triaxiality for deep notch SE(B) and C(T) specimens and shallow notch SE(B) specimens, with and without side grooves. Crack front conditions are characterized in terms of J-Q trajectories and the constraint model for cleavage fracture toughness proposed previously by Dodds and Anderson. An extension of the toughness scaling model suggested here combines a revised ‘in-plane’ constraint correction with an explicit thickness correction derived from extreme value statistics. The 3-D analyses provide ‘effective’ thicknesses for use in the statistical correction which reflect the interaction of material flow properties and specimen aspect ratios, a/W and W/B, on the varying levels of stress triaxiality over the crack front. The 3-D computational results imply that a significantly less strict size/deformation limit, relative to the limit indicated by previous plane-strain computations, is needed to maintain small-scale yielding conditions at fracture by a stress-controlled, cleavage mechanism in deep notch SE(B) and C(T) speciments. Moreover, the analyses indicate that side grooves (20 percent) should have essentially no net effect on measured toughness values of such specimens. Additional new results made available from the 3-D analyses also include revised η-plastic factors for use in experimental studies to convert measured work quantities to thickness average and maximum (local) J-values over the crack front. To estimate CTOD values, new m-factors are included for use in the expression 131-1.

A review of Finite Fracture Mechanics: crack initiation at singular and non-singular stress raisers

Abstract: Crack initiation in brittle materials is not covered by classical fracture mechanics that deals only with the growth of pre-existing cracks. In order to overcome this deficiency, the Finite Fracture Mechanics concept assumes the instantaneous formation of cracks of finite size at initiation. Within this framework, a coupled criterion was proposed at the beginning of the 2000’s requiring two necessary conditions to be fulfilled simultaneously. The first one compares the tensile stress to the tensile strength, while the other uses an energy balance and the material toughness. The present analysis is restricted to the 2D case, and, through a wide list of references, it is shown that this criterion gives predictions in agreement with experiments in various cases of stress concentration, which can be classified in two categories: the singularities, i.e. indefinitely growing stresses at a point, and the non-singular stress raisers. It is applied to different materials and structures: notched specimens, laminates, adhesive joints or embedded inclusions. Of course, a lot of work remains to do in these domains but also in domains that are almost not explored such as fatigue loadings and dynamic loadings as well as a sound 3D extension. Some ideas in these directions are issued before concluding that FFM and the coupled criterion have filled a gap in fracture mechanics.