Application of 3D X-Ray Tomography to Enhance the Calibration of Ductile Fracture Models

Author(s):  
Michael Daly ◽  
Fabien Leonard ◽  
Andrew H. Sherry

Reactor Pressure Vessels (RPV) are manufactured from medium strength low allow ferritic steel specifically selected for its high toughness and weldability. The normal operating temperature of RPV steels is sufficiently high to ensure that the material remains ductile throughout its service life with an extremely low probability of cleavage under normal and off-normal loading conditions. Understanding and having the ability to predict ductile fracture behaviour is consequently important. The ductile fracture mechanism is characterised by the nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids at initiating particles within the volume of high triaxial stress and plastic strain ahead of a crack-tip or stress concentrator. The fracture properties of the steels are conventionally determined using standard pre-cracked compact test specimens. Mechanistically based models of fracture can be calibrated against those data. This paper describes the use of 3D laboratory X-ray tomography to characterise the void distribution associated with the ductile fracture in test specimens and use the data to calibrate the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman ductile fracture model. The tomography successfully captures voids ≥ 6um in diameter and has been used to define the average distribution of void volume fraction as a function of distance below the fracture surface. The tomography results also allow an estimate of the critical and final void volume fractions to be made as well as capture secondary void peaks well below the fracture surface. This distribution of voids was used to calibrate the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman model in order to correlate experimental observations with the finite element models. The models have been able to replicate the observed trends of the void volume fraction distributions away from the fracture surface including the secondary peaks observed by tomography and to reproduce similar J-R curve behaviour as that observed in the test specimens.

Author(s):  
Michael Daly ◽  
Fabien Leonard ◽  
John K. Sharples ◽  
Andrew H. Sherry

Ductile damage is characterised by the nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids at initiating particles within the volume of high triaxial stresses and plastic strain ahead of a crack-tip or stress concentrator. To establish a more detailed understanding of the mechanism of ductile fracture in the A508 Class 3 ferritic RPV steels and to improve fracture models, the ductile damage was quantified below the fracture surface of tested compact test specimens using laboratory X-ray tomography imaging with sufficient resolution to image voids of approximately 10μm in diameter. The average distribution of void volume fraction as a function of distance below the fracture surface was quantified, and the initiating and coalescence mechanisms were characterised. The highest void volume fraction was observed at the fracture surface and this tends to decrease as a function of distance below the fracture surface. This decrease is periodically perturbed by large voids associated with inclusions which are distributed throughout the microstructure and act as further nucleating sites at low strains. This distribution of voids was correlated with the local variations in stress triaxiality and plastic strain derived from finite element analyses to provide a relationship between experimental observations and the Rice and Tracey model. These correlations aim to provide new data and understanding with which to calibrate mechanistically based models such as the Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman (GTN) model.


Author(s):  
Kerry L. Taylor ◽  
Andrew H. Sherry

Ductile damage mechanics models provide a tool for the prediction of ductile damage and tearing in ductile materials. Models require knowledge of key microstructural features that influence the ductile failure process in order to calibrate critical model parameters. These parameters include the initial and final void volume fraction. The approach widely used to define the initial void volume fraction is to relate this to the volume fraction of void-initiating precipitates quantified using 2D metallography. This paper illustrates how synchrotron X-ray tomography, and high resolution Focused Ion Beam tomography can provide a new and more reliable approach to defining such starting parameters and can provide additional insights into the ductile failure process. This enables more realistic parameters to be derived that predict the distribution of ductile damage below the final fracture surface and hence provide added confidence in the use of the model to predict global behaviour. Results of synchrotron and FIB tomography experiments undertaken with respect to an aluminium alloy AL2024-T351 are presented. The resulting data illustrates the initial microstructure, which includes shrinkage porosity, coarse precipitates and fine dispersoids, and the final microstructure close to the fracture surface following failure. The data demonstrate that the void volume fraction initially increases by the growth of porosity and by precipitate fracturing. Final failure occurs by the rapid formation of nano-scale voids at dispersoids. Analyses of notched tensile specimens are undertaken using the GTN model with parameters derived from the tomography data. Conclusions are drawn regarding the use of microstructurally-derived parameters to predict ductile fracture behaviour.


Author(s):  
Zijie Song ◽  
Zhiqiang Hu

The NVA mild steel is a commonly used material in shipbuilding, which possesses good ductility character. However, the description of ductile fracture process for NVA steel in numerical simulation is still a challenging task. A new method to predict the critical void volume fraction fc of Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman (GTN) model is introduced in this paper. GTN-model is one of the well-known micromechanical models for ductile fracture. The traditional plasticity theory assumes that the plastic volume is incompressible and that the yield of the material is independent of the hydrostatic stress, whereas the yield surface of the GTN-model takes the effect of the macroscopic hydrostatic stress into account. The yield surface is reduced with the increase of the void volume fraction, which can reflect the deterioration characteristics of the material with development of damage during the deformation process. Therefore, GTN-model is a promising mathematical model for describing the ductile fracture process of the ship structures during accidental scenarios of collision and grounding. The traditional way to determine fc of GTN-model is using the inverse method directly, which has a high degree of uncertainty. A new method based on Hill, and Bressan & Williams’s assumptions proposed in this paper solve this problem effectively. Besides, the combined of Voce and Swift constitutive model is used to describe the mechanical property of the NVA material. Furthermore, numerical simulations were also conducted with code LS_DYNA by developing the user-defined subroutine. It is found that the model can predict the structural damage quite accurately, which proves its feasibility of being applied in the research of structural responses in ship collision and grounding accidents.


2018 ◽  
Vol 928 ◽  
pp. 38-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathew John ◽  
Raghu V. Prakash

The void formation in FRP composites is unavoidable and the void content measurement is very important to study its deleterious effects on the mechanical properties of the material. Generally destructive methods are used to calculate the void volume fraction. But the recent advances in X-ray computed tomography can be used to detect and quantify the void content in the composites in a non-destructive manner. In this study average area method is proposed and validated for the void volume measurement from the X-ray CT image slices through digital image processing. The effects of void size, shape and position in the accuracy of the measurement is studied and presented here. The void volume fraction of a CFRP laminate manufactured with compression molding technique is calculated by this method and found to be around 1%.


2012 ◽  
Vol 06 ◽  
pp. 257-262
Author(s):  
Junhang Guo ◽  
Ri-ichi Murakami ◽  
Shengdun Zhao

Ductile fracture has been a hot topic for a long time for its importance to mechanical design in evaluating the risk of failure. In this paper, the A5052BD-H14's ductile fracture is studied using a new constitutive equation based on the continuum damage mechanics. A novel full-implicit stress integration algorithm is developed based on Rousselier's damage model and implemented into finite element analysis (FEA) models by the ABAQUS/Explicit using the user material subroutine. The tensile tests of A5052BD-H14 with notch were taken and the load-displacement curves were recorded. By simulations, the evolutions of the void volume fraction are obtained and can be used as calibration for the critical void volume fraction. The validity of the damage model and the proposed stress integration algorithm are verified by comparing the experimental results and the simulation results. Further, by using the critical void volume fraction and element deletion, the simulation results show that this method is reliable, and can be used to predict the fracture of metals.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 444-456
Author(s):  
Zijie Song ◽  
Zhiqiang Hu ◽  
Jonas W. Ringsberg

Abstract NVA mild steel is a commonly used material in the shipbuilding industry. An accurate model for description of this material’s ductile fracture behaviour in numerical simulation is still a challenging task. In this paper, a new method for predicting the critical void volume fraction fc in the Guson-Tvergaard-Needleman (GTN) model is introduced to describe the ductile fracture behaviour of NVA shipbuilding mild steel during ship collision and grounding scenarios. Most of the previous methods for determination of the parameter fc use a converse method, which determines the values of the parameters through comparisons between experimental results and numerical simulation results but with high uncertainty. A new method is proposed based on the Hill, Bressan, and Williams hypothesis, which reduces the uncertainty to a satisfying extent. To accurately describe the stress-strain relationship of materials before and after necking, a combination of the Voce and Swift models is used to describe the material properties of NVA mild steel. A user-defined material subroutine has been developed to enable the application of the new parameter determination method and its implementation in the finite element software LS-DYNA. It is observed that the model can accurately describe structural damage by comparing the numerical simulation results with those of experiments; thus, the results demonstrate the model’s capacity for structural response prediction in ship collision and grounding scenario simulations


Materials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1783 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tao Huang ◽  
Mei Zhan ◽  
Kun Wang ◽  
Fuxiao Chen ◽  
Junqing Guo ◽  
...  

In this paper, the initial values of damage parameters in the Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman (GTN) model are determined by a microscopic test combined with empirical formulas, and the final accurate values are determined by finite element reverse calibration. The original void volume fraction (f0), the volume fraction of potential nucleated voids (fN), the critical void volume fraction (fc), the void volume fraction at the final failure (fF) of material are assigned as 0.006, 0.001, 0.03, 0.06 according to the simulation results, respectively. The hemispherical punch stretching test of commercially pure titanium (TA1) sheet is simulated by a plastic constitutive formula derived from the GTN model. The stress and strain are obtained at the last loading step before crack. The forming limit diagram (FLD) and the forming limit stress diagram (FLSD) of the TA1 sheet under plastic forming conditions are plotted, which are in good agreement with the FLD obtained by the hemispherical punch stretching test and the FLSD obtained by the conversion between stress and strain during the sheet forming process. The results show that the GTN model determined by the finite element reverse calibration method can be used to predict the forming limit of the TA1 sheet metal.


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