by Holzmann, Miloslav; Jurášek, Ladislav; Dlouhý, Ivo

The paper reports on an investigation of the micromechanism of cleavage fracture in hypoeutectoid pearlitic R7T steel, commonly used for producing railway wheels. The steel possesses extensive Lüders deformation, which somewhat complicates finite element (FE) modelling and analyses of fracture behaviour. Standard Charpy V-notch specimens were used in order to analyse the fracture behaviour at quasistatic and impact loading. Finite element 3D calculations were performed and the elastic-plastic behaviour of notched bars up to the fracture was simulated. Detailed fractographic analysis was carried out on a number of Charpy V-notch specimens in order to investigate the origin site of cleavage fracture initiation and its distance from the notch root. The suitability of the three-criterion micromechanical model (Chen et al. Acta Materialia 51:1841–1855, 2003) for cleavage initiation was verified. The R7T steel under investigation exhibited a cleavage fracture stress of 1,837 MPa. Its independence on temperature evidenced the micromechanism of cleavage fracture to be microcrack propagation-controlled. For the investigated blunt-notched bend bars, an active volume exists ahead of the notch root in which pearlite colony-associated initiation sites are located. The cleavage fracture initiation of the steel is thus governed by the sites lying in the active volume. The active volume is determined by the values of three parameters. A plastic strain lying in interval from $${\varepsilon_{\rm pmin}}$$ to $${\varepsilon_{\rm pmax}}$$ (for the steel investigated from 0.033 to 0.108) is necessary to create a cleavage crack nucleus at any location within the active volume depending on the local pearlite properties. A stress triaxiality parameter ranging from h
_min to h
_max (from 0.93 to 1.39) is supposed to prevent the blunting process at the site of the cleavage nucleus. Once the main principal stress σ
₁ exceeds the local cleavage fracture stress σ
_CFmin, an unstable global cleavage fracture occurs in a blunt-notched bar.

DOI: 10.1007/s10704-007-9173-3
Online Date: 1/25/2008
Print publication date: 11/1/2007
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by Tvergaard, Viggo

Ductile crack growth is analyzed by discrete representation of the voids growing near a blunting crack-tip. Coalescence of the nearest void with the crack-tip is modeled, followed by the subsequent coalescence of other discretely represented voids with the newly formed crack-tip. Necking of the ligaments between the crack-tip and a void or between voids involves the development of very large strains, which are included in the model by using remeshing at several stages of the plastic deformation. The material is here described by standard isotropic hardening Mises theory. For a very small void volume fraction the crack-tip tends to interact with one void at a time, while larger void volume fractions lead to simultaneous interaction of multiple voids on the plane ahead of the crack-tip. In some cases a change from one of these mechanisms to the other is seen during growth through the many voids represented here. First uniformly spaced voids of equal size are considered, but also a few computations for a random distribution of the void spacings or of the void sizes are carried out.

DOI: 10.1007/s10704-007-9172-4
Online Date: 1/15/2008
Print publication date: 11/1/2007
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