Mechanical characterization of Ti-5Al-2.5Sn ELI alloy at cryogenic and room temperatures

An experimental campaign consisting of tensile and fracture tests at cryogenic and room temperatures has been conducted on a Ti-5Al-2.5Sn extralow- interstitial (ELI) alloy. It has been assessed that, at decreasing testing temperature: Young’s modulus slightly increases; yield and failure strengths increase significantly; fracture toughness decreases. Since a ductile void growth to coalescence micromechanism always governs failure in the spanned temperature interval, crack growth is simulated by allowing formaterial nonlinearities in the process zone, where ductile tearing takes place. Numerical results have been obtained by modeling the response of the process zone through either a cohesive model or Gurson’s constitutive law for porous-ductile media. It is shown that the latter approach can accurately describe the failure mechanism at any test temperature and for any specimen geometry, whereas the former one is not able to account for stress triaxiality at the crack tip and therefore requires a new calibration anytime the specimen geometry is varied.