Effect of Welding Residual Stress and Plastic Constraint on Brittle Fracture of a High Strength Steel

Abstract

This paper investigates the effect of welding residual stress and plastic constraint on brittle fracture of a 780 MPa class high-strength steel (HT780). In order to investigate the effect of welding residual stress, three point bend (3PB) fracture toughness tests were conducted using the parent-material specimens and groove-welded specimens which were prepared to have the same cross-sectional proportion; i.e., a ratio of thickness to width of 0.5. Crack length was determined so that the crack tip was located in the base-metal zone far from the heat-affected zone of the welded specimen to eliminate the effect of any degradation of the parent-material property on fracture resistance. Also, in order to investigate the effect of constraint, tensile loading tests in which the plastic constraint was expected to be less than 3PB were conducted using welded specimens as the same as employed in the 3PB test. Three dimensional finite element (FE) analyses were performed to evaluate the stress state near the crack tip at the point of brittle fracture initiation for each test condition. From the results of experiments and FE analyses, it is confirmed that the fracture test results can be evaluated using J or KJ – Q theory, by considering enhancement or reduction due to residual stress.