International Journal of Fracture最新文献

Williams asymptotic expansions are widely used to represent mechanical fields at the vicinity of crack-tips in plane elastic media. For practical applications, series solutions have to be truncated and it is believed that a better accuracy can be achieved by retaining more terms in the summations. The influence of the truncation on the accuracy can be quantified comparing truncated closed-form Williams series solutions available for some fracture configurations to their corresponding complex exact counterparts. The computation of 2D absolute error fields reveals astonishing patterns in which appear points with numerically zero error implying the existence of loci where truncated series can provide exact results. These loci of exactness gather on curves emanating from the crack-tips and pointing towards the outside of series convergence disks. An analytical investigation of this phenomenon allows to relate the number and tangency angle at the crack-tip of these curves to the number and values of the zeros of Williams series angular eigenfunctions. Beyond its analytical interest in the understanding of Williams series framework, this property of exactness for truncated series can also help to improve the accuracy of experimental and computational techniques based on Williams series.

The existing mechanical dicing process of single crystalline Silicon Carbide (SiC) is one of the main factors limiting the development of semiconductor process, which could be replaced by laser scribing potentially. To achieve efficient and low-damage SiC separation, the cracking behavior of SiC after laser grooving should be well understood and controllable. Since the laser grooving including thermal ablation and meltage solidification, the cracking behavior of the scribed SiC would be different to the original single crystal SiC. In this paper, cohesive zone model (CZM) is used to quantitively represent the cracking behavior of the nano-laser scribed SiC. The separation after scribing was conducted in a three-point bending (3 PB) fixture to characterize the cracking behavior. Therefore, by inverting the load–displacement curves of 3 PB with CZM embedded finite element model, the cohesive behavior is characterized by bilinear traction–separation law, which illustrated the whole cracking process numerically. The methodology established in current paper gives way to understand the SiC scribing and cracking process with quantitative cohesive parameters.

Construction of the Kitagawa–Takahashi (K–T) diagram requires inputs of two material properties, namely, endurance limit and threshold stress intensity range, ΔK_th. Both are sensitive to applied stress ratio. The effect of stress ratio on endurance limit is well known. Unfortunately, crack closure, associated with the nature of conventional testing practice obscures the effect of stress ratio on intrinsic, closure free ΔK_th that would apply to natural crack like defects and short cracks. This study was made possible by the development of a new test method to characterize closure free threshold conditions under controlled near-tip residual stress conditions that essentially determine near-tip stress ratio at threshold. A procedure is described to construct the K–T diagram, using ΔK_th values corrected for stress ratio and applicable to pre-existing defects and short cracks at notches that are unlikely to see closure. As a case study, a K–T diagram valid for different applied stress ratios is constructed for titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V.

Accurate fatigue life prediction of polycrystalline materials is crucial for many engineering applications. In polycrystalline materials, a significant portion of life is spent in the crack nucleation phase at the microstructural scale. Hence, the total fatigue life shows high sensitivity to the local microstructure. To predict fatigue life accurately, the microstructure models of polycrystalline material i.e., titanium alloy are virtually generated with the help of the Voronoi tessellation technique. These models incorporate critical microstructural features such as grain size, grain shape, and the volume fraction of different phases within the material. To efficiently predict microstructure sensitive fatigue life, the smooth finite element method (SFEM) is coupled with continuum damage mechanics (CDM). The SFEM provides flexibility in the meshing of complex microstructure geometries as it alleviates the need to use only triangular and quadrilateral elements. Moreover, there is no need of isoparametric mapping and explicit form of shape function derivatives in SFEM, hence it requires less computation time. To obtain the fatigue life (in number of cycles), jump in cycles algorithm is implemented using SFEM-CDM. The numerical results of fatigue life data obtained from simulations are compared with experimental data, which reveals the validity of the present approach. This approach is useful to find out the scatter in fatigue life data of polycrystalline materials along with the source of scatter.

The fracture resistance of pinewood under mode I loading is investigated experimentally for different crack plane orientations and the crack propagation direction parallel to longitudinal cells. Experiments are conducted on double cantilever beams using a digital image correlation system to evaluate the crack tip opening displacement. The compliance based beam method is used to determine the energy release rate at various crack lengths. The decomposition of crack propagation into the pre-peak and post-peak propagations is proposed to find the fracture energy contributions from individual toughening mechanisms in pinewood. The cohesive strengths measured in the experiments are confirmed by comparison with the tensile strengths obtained from separate tests performed on pinewood. An analytical model for evaluating the fracture process zone is used to validate the experimental results. The difference between the fracture energy values in different crack propagation systems is explained by using X-ray microtomography images of the fracture surfaces.