Elastic Fracture Toughness of Ductile Materials

Linear elastic fracture mechanics has been widely used for fracture analysis of cracked metals. For ductile materials, it is known that the yielding of a crack front results in the easing of stress intensity at the crack front, which ultimately increases the total fracture toughness of the material. Therefore, to use linear elastic fracture mechanics for prediction of the failure of ductile materials requires the extraction of the elastic...