On fracture locus in the equivalent strain and stress triaxiality space

The stress triaxiality is, besides the strain intensity, the most important factor that controls initiation of ductile fracture. In this study, a series of tests including upsetting tests, shear tests and tensile tests on 2024-T351 aluminum alloy providing clues to fracture ductility for a wide range of stress triaxiality was carried out. Numerical simulations of each test was performed using commercial finite element code ABAQUS. Good correlation of experiments and numerical simulations was achieved. Based on the experimental and numerical results, the relation between the equivalent strain to fracture versus the stress triaxiality was quantified and it was shown that there are three distinct branches of this function with possible slope discontinuities in the transition regime. For negative stress triaxialities, fracture is governed by shear mode. For large triaxialities void growth is the dominant failure mode, while at low stress triaxialities between above two regimes, fracture may develop as a combination of shear and void growth modes. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.