Statistical characterization of specimen size and temperature dependence of cleavage fracture toughness of ferritic steels

Abstract

Based on the numerical results on the non‐linear correlation between volume of plastic zone and global loading level represented by stress intensity factor, the dependence of cleavage fracture toughness of ferritic steels on specimen size and temperature is evaluated based on an empirical statistical model. The statistical correlation is supported by two sets of toughness data measured from different sized compact tension specimens at different temperatures. To further improve the accuracy of the statistical model, future work is identified to quantify the variation of volume of plastic deformation zone with loading level and measure the average volume for each microcrack at different temperature.