Tensile, compression and fracture properties of thick-walled ductile cast iron components

The article presents the outcome of a comprehensive program of tensile, compression and fracture toughness experiments, addressing thick-walled ductile cast iron inserts used for the production of three nuclear waste canisters. The resulting data are required as input to the assessment of the failure probability of the canisters. Moreover, these data are useful for the improvement of the casting technique as such. Although the same material specification is always used, material properties are found to show significant variation. Considerable attention is paid to linking the scatter in tensile properties to fractographic and microstructural observations. The main finding is that low ductility tensile test results can be primarily connected to the presence of specific casting defects, from which oxide films have the most detrimental effect. Another important observation is that compression experiments do not result in low ductility failure. During fracture testing, stable ductile crack propagation is observed. Basic fracture analysis of a tensile test is performed in order to better understand the effect of defect size, stress-strain behavior and fracture toughness on the ductility measured through tensile testing. Two opposing specimen size effects are observed.