A simplified method for evaluation of brittle crack arrest toughness of steels in scaled-down bending tests

The wide-plate crack arrest test under tensile load for characterizing the brittle crack arrest toughness of high strength shipbuilding steel requires high economical cost and long lead-time, so there is still a substantial industry need for the simplified evaluation using the scaled-down specimen. The alternative method using a single edge-notched bending specimen, which assumes the complete load redistribution during the crack propagation, was recently proposed. However, it was confirmed that the results obtained using this method exhibited a low correlation with the arrest toughness obtained using the wide-plate tests. A new scaled-down version of the crack arrest test under bending load and a series of simplified evaluation based on the dynamic elasto-plastic FEA were introduced to characterize the crack arrest performance of the two types of steel plates in this investigation. The specimen is a single edge-notched tapered plate subjected to a three-point bending load in an isothermal environment. The geometry was selected so that the dynamic crack driving force calculated using FEA decreases monotonically with the crack propagation. For adopting a simplistic analytical approach considering the dynamic effect, the dynamic FEA simulation assumed the constant crack velocity and flat crack front and output the opening stress distributed ahead of the growing crack. The experimentally obtained values of the arrested crack length and the analytically obtained transition curves of the dynamic SIF were employed to characterize the crack arrest performance of the two steels. The results obtained using the simplified method developed in this investigation exhibited a high correlation with the arrest toughness obtained using the wide-plate crack arrest test.