5.1 Surface cracks are among the most common defects found in structural components. An accurate characterization and understanding of crack-front behavior is necessary to ensure successful operation of a structure containing surface cracks. The testing of laboratory specimens with surface cracks provides a means to understand and quantify surface crack behavior, but the test results must be interpreted correctly to ensure transferability between the laboratory specimen and the structure.
5.2 Transferability refers to the capacity of a fracture mechanics methodology to correlate the crack-tip stress and strain fields of different cracked bodies. Traditionally, the correlation has been based on the presence at fracture of a dominant, asymptotically singular, crack-tip field with amplitude set by the value of a single parameter, such as the stress intensity factor, KI, or the J-integral. For components and specimens with high crack-tip constraint, the singular crack-tip field dominates over microstructurally significant size scales for loads ranging from globally linear-elastic conditions to moderately large-scale plasticity. For specimens with low crack-tip constraint, a dominant single-parameter crack-tip field exists only at low levels of plasticity. At higher levels of plasticity, the opening mode stress of the low constraint specimen is lower than predicted by the single-parameter, asymptotically singular fields. Therefore, low constraint specimens often exhibit larger fracture toughness than do high constraint specimens. If feasible, users are strongly encouraged to generate high constraint fracture toughness data using methods such as E399 or E1820 prior to testing the surface crack geometry.
5.2.1 To address this phenomenon, two-parameter fracture criteria are used to include the influence of crack-tip constraint. Crack-tip constraint has been quantified using various scalar parameters including the T-stress (6, 7, 8), Q (9, 10), stress triaxiality (11, 12), and αh (13, 14). Fracture toughness in a two-parameter methodology is not a single value, but rather is a curve that defines a critical locus of fracture toughness and constraint values (2). Fig. 2 illustrates a toughness-constraint locus for application of two-parameter fracture mechanics to structures. A structural analysis provides the driving force curve for the configuration of interest, and is plotted with the toughness-constraint locus obtained from specimen test data. Crack extension is predicted when the driving force curve passes through the toughness-constraint locus.
5.3 Tests conducted with this method provide data to assist in the prediction of structural capability in the presence of a surface crack by including a measure of crack-tip constraint in the interpretation of fracture toughness values. This improves the correlation of test specimen and structural conditions. To achieve the most accurate comparison, the conditions tested per this test method should match the structure as closely as possible. For conservative structural assessment, the user should ensure that conditions in the test specimen produce higher levels of constraint relative to the str...........
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