Book Description

"Cleavage fracture has been a very important subject for engineers for a long time because of the catastrophic result it may cause. The experimental results of cleavage fracture exhibit a large amount of scatter and show significant constraint effect, which motivated the development of statistical and micromechanics based methods in order to deal with such problem. The Weibull stress model, which is based on the weakest link statistics, uses two parameters, m and [sigma]u?, to describe the inherent distribution of the micro-scale cracks once the plastic deformation has occurred and to define the relationship between the macro and micro-scale driving forces for cleavage fracture. In this paper we examine constraint effects on cleavage fracture toughness numerically using a constraint function g(M) derived from the Weibull stress model. The non-dimensional function g(M) describes the evolution of constraint loss effects on fracture toughness relative to reference plane-strain small scale yielding (SSY) condition (T-stress=0). We performed detailed finite element analyses of single-edge notched bending speciments and compute g(M) functions for them. The g-function varies with parameters of the Weibull stress model, material flow properties and speciment geometry but not with absolute specimen size. Knowing the g-function one can construct fracture driving force curves for each absolute size of interest."--Abstract.