Dynamic material properties and their application to components Original Research Article

A methodology was developed for safety analyses of dynamically loaded cracked power plant components. For that purpose fracture tests were performed by means of compact tension specimens made from different ferritic fine grained structural steels and an austenitic steel at different loading rates. Experimental and numerical analyses of the influence of increasing loading rate on the near tip displacement field are described. Thereby, strain rate in the process zone of a crack can be estimated. It was possible to determine the state of stress and local displacement and strain rates from numerical analyses of experiments with components and large scale specimens. Time derivatives of stress intensity factor K resp. J-integral can be used as sufficient parameters for characterizing the loading rate of specimens and components.