Fracture behaviour and cleavage initiation in hypoeutectoid pearlitic steel

The paper reports on an investigation of the micromechanism of cleavage fracture in hypoeutectoid pearlitic R7T steel, commonly used for producing railway wheels. The steel possesses extensive Lüders deformation, which somewhat complicates finite element (FE) modelling and analyses of fracture behaviour. Standard Charpy V-notch specimens were used in order to analyse the fracture behaviour at quasistatic and impact loading. Finite element 3D calculations were performed and the elastic-plastic behaviour of notched bars up to the fracture was simulated. Detailed fractographic analysis was carried out on a number of Charpy V-notch specimens in order to investigate the origin site of cleavage fracture initiation and its distance from the notch root. The suitability of the threecriterion micromechanical model (Chen et al. Acta Materialia 51:1841-1855, 2003) for cleavage initiation was verified. The R7T steel under investigation exhibited a cleavage fracture stress of 1,837MPa. Its independence on temperature evidenced the micromechanism of cleavage fracture to be microcrack propagation- controlled. For the investigated blunt-notched bend bars, an active volume exists ahead of the notch root in which pearlite colony-associated initiation sitesare located. The cleavage fracture initiation of the steel is thus governed by the sites lying in the active volume. The active volume is determined by the values of three parameters. A plastic strain lying in interval from εpmin to εpmax (for the steel investigated from 0.033 to 0.108) is necessary to create a cleavage crack nucleus at any location within the active volume depending on the local pearlite properties. A stress triaxiality parameter ranging from hmin to hmax (from 0.93 to 1.39) is supposed to prevent the blunting process at the site of the cleavage nucleus. Once the main principal stress σ1 exceeds the local cleavage fracture stress σCFmin, an unstable global cleavage fracture occurs in a bluntnotched bar.