Int J Adv Manuf Technol DOI 10.

1007/s00170-008-1872-z

SPECIAL ISSUE - ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Determination of J-integral and stress intensity factor using the commercial FE software ABAQUS in austenitic stainless steel (AISI 304) plates
G. Venkatachalam & R. Harichandran & S. Rajakumar & C. Dharmaraja & C. Pandivelan

Received: 26 February 2008 / Accepted: 18 September 2008 # Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008

Abstract This paper presents J-integral and stress intensity factor solutions for several crack configurations in plates. The edge crack is considered for the analysis. The tensile load is applied and the crack propagation is studied. The finite element method is used to model the plate and mode I stress intensity factors are evaluated. For solving the FE model, commercial FE software ABAQUS is used. Several cases including different thickness and crack lengths are presented for not only linear elastic analysis but also for elastic-plastic analysis. The 3-D model is taken for the analysis and eight-noded brick element is used for FE mesh. Keywords J-integral . Stress intensity factor . Finite element method

discipline. The stress intensity factor (SIF) characterizes the stresses, strains, and displacements near the crack tip. If the plastic zone near the crack tip is large, then the SIF no longer characterizes the crack tip conditions. So calculation of SIF is limited to linear elastic fracture mechanics. When the plastic zone is large or non-linear material behavior becomes significant, one should discard SIF and crack tip parameters (either J-integral or CTOD) that takes larger plastic zone near the crack tip and non-linear material behavior into account. Here, an attempt is made to find out J-integral. The T-stress is increasingly being recognized as an important additional stress field characterizing parameter in the analyses of cracked bodies. The elastic T-stress represents the stress-acting parallel to the crack plane. It is known that the sign and magnitude of T-stress can substantially alter the level of crack tip stress triaxiality.

1 Introduction Fracture mechanics has reached the level of sophistication as well as wide industrial acceptance such that many actual and potential brittle failure problems can be dealt through this 2 Literature review Rice [1] applied the deformation plasticity to the analysis of a crack in a non-linear material. He showed that the nonenergy release rate J could be written as a path-independent line integral. Rice and Rosengren [2] showed that J uniquely characterizes crack tip stresses and strains in non-linear materials. Kobayashi et al. [3] used finite element analysis to determine numerically Rices J-integral values in centrally notched plates of 43.40 steel. For increasing level of loading, the rate of increase in J-integral decreases and J-integral remains almost constant at when the load is at yield point under such crack extension. Courtin et al. [4] applied the crack opening displacement extrapolation method and the J-integral approach in 2D and 3D ABAQUS finite element models. The results obtained by them are in good agreement with those found in the

G. Venkatachalam : C. Dharmaraja : C. Pandivelan School of Mechanical & Building Sciences, VIT University, Vellore 632014, India R. Harichandran (*) Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Engineering College, Kovilpatti 628503, India e-mail: hari_chandra1984@yahoo.com S. Rajakumar Department of Mechanical Engineering, SCAD College of Engineering, Cheranmahadevi, Tirunelveli, India

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a (mm) 0.5 0 -5 -10 J (J/Sq.m) -15 -20 -25 -30 -35 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9

Elastic
Fig. 1 Edge-crack model Fig. 4 a vs. J

Elastic-Plastic

a (mm) 1200 1000 K1c (MPa/mm) 800 600 400 200 0 -200
Fig. 5 a vs. K1c

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

Fig. 2 Close view of crack

0.5 100 50 0 T Stress (MPa) -50 -100 -150 -200 -250 -300 -350
Fig. 3 FE mesh of model Fig. 6 a vs. T-stress

0.6

a (mm) 0.7

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t (mm)

Load (N) 6 7 0 J (J/Sq.M) -20 -40 -60 -80

elastic elastic RI elastic - plastic elastic-palstic RI

3 -20 -21 J (J/Sq.m) -22 -23 -24 -25 -26

100 150 200 250 300 325 350

Elastic

Elastic-Plastic

Fig. 10 F vs. J

Fig. 7 t vs. J

t (mm) 3000 2500 K1c (MPa/m m ) 2000 1500 1000 500 0

Fig. 8 t vs. K1c

Load (N) 6 7 800 700 K 1 c ( M P a / m m ) 600 500 400 300 200 100 0
Fig. 11 F vs. K1c

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150

200

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300

350

t (mm) 3 600 400 T Stress (MPa) T Stress (MPa) 200 0 -200 -400 -600 -800 -1000
Fig. 9 t vs. T-stress

Load (N) 6 7 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0
Fig. 12 F vs. T-stress

100

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literature. Nevertheless, since the knowledge of the field near the crack tip is not required in the energetic method, the J-integral calculations seem to be a good technique to deal with the fatigue growth of general cracks. Rajaram et al. [5] presented an approach to obtain fracture mechanics singularity strength (J, K1, etc.) along a 3D crack-front using tetrahedral elements. Hocine et al. [6] determined the energy parameter J for rubber-like materials. Owen and Fawkes [7] developed many numerical methods using finite element analysis to obtain SIF values.

thickness which are shown in Figs. 10 and 11. But the same is linear when a and t are kept constant (Fig. 12). Constant F and t a vs. J (Fig. 4). a vs. K1c (Fig. 5). a vs. T-stress (Fig. 6). Constant F and a t vs. J (Fig. 7). t vs. K1c (Fig. 8). t vs. T-stress (Fig. 9). Constant a and t F vs. J (Fig. 10). F vs. K1c (Fig. 11). F vs. T-stress (Fig. 12).

3 Finite element analysis The edge-crack model shown in Fig. 1 is taken for the analysis. The Fig. 2 shows the close view of crack. The tensile load distributed in nature is applied at the top of the plate and the bottom face is constrained. The material taken for our analysis is Austenitic stainless steel (AISI 304). Figure 3 shows the finite element mesh of the model. The eight-node linear brick elements (C3D8 in ABAQUS) with three degrees of freedom at each node are considered. An attempt is also made with reduced integration. Reduced integration uses a lower-order integration to form the element stiffness. It reduces running time, especially in three dimensions. There are 375 nodes and 224 elements are used in the model.

5 Conclusion Finite element model is created to find the fracture properties of Austenite stainless steel (AISI 304). The FE analysis was carried out by FEA commercial software ABAQUS. Fracture properties of edge-crack plate with tensile load are studied. SIF and T-stress are found out for elastic limit where as J-integral is found out for both elastic and elastic-plastic models. It is found that there is a considerable change in the value of J-integral in when the load crosses elastic limit.

4 Results and discussions This paper is basically dealing three kind of analysis. The variations of J-integral, T-stress and SIF with respect to crack length (a), thickness of model (t) and load (F) conditions are studied. In all the cases, one parameter is varied and other two parameters are kept constant. For a constant load and thickness, the increase in the value of J-integral for both elastic and elastic-plastic is same up to the elastic limit which is shown in the Fig. 4. After elastic limit, there is no appreciable increase in the value of J-integral for the elastic analysis. Figure 5 shows that the increase in t for elastic has no influence on the value of J-integral whereas it is linear in the case of elastic-plastic. The variation of J with load is also studied (Fig. 6). Here, the values of J are compared with reduced integration. Until the elastic limit, there is no variation for all cases; but when the load goes beyond the elastic limit, decrease in the value of J for elastic-plastic is more than that of elastic. In elastic analysis, elements with reduced integration have no influence where as in elasticplastic, it matters. Figure 7 shows that the SIF decreases initially when a increases; but there is no significant decrease in SIF for further increase in a. SIF linearly increases with respect to t and F (Figs. 8 and 9). The T-stress distribution is highly turbulent for both different crack lengths and different

References
1. Rice JR (1968) A path independent integral and the approximate analysis of strain concentration by notches and cracks. J Appl Mech 35:379386 2. Rice JR, Rosengren GF (1968) Plane strain deformation near a crack tip in a power law hardening material. J Mech Phys Solids 16:112 3. Kobayashi AS, Chiu ST, Beeuwkes R (1973) A numerical and experimental investigation on the use of J-integral. J Appl Mech 15:293305 4. Courtina S, Gardina C, Bezinea G, Ben Hadj Hamoudab H (2005) Advantages of the J-integral approach for calculating stress intensity factors when using the commercial finite element software ABAQUS. Eng Fract Mech 72:21742185 5. Rajaram H, Socrate S, Parks DM (2000) Application of domain integral methods using tetrahedral elements to the determination of stress intensity factors. Eng Fract Mech 66(5):455482 6. Ait Hocine N, Nait Abdelaziz M, Ghfiri H, Mesmacque G (1996) Evaluation of the energy parameter J on rubber-like materials: comparison between experimental and numerical results. Eng Fract Mech 55(6):919933 7. Owen DRJ, Fawkes AJ (1983) Engineering fracture mechanics: numerical methods and applications. Pineridge, Swansea, UK