Analysis of ductile tearing using a local approach to fracture

In this paper, the Rice and Tracey (RT) model based on growth of cavities is verified in order to describe the ductile tearing in stainless steel 12Ni6Cr and aluminium alloy. Experimentally, central crack panel and compact tension specimens were tested. The comparison of the experimental results with the classical RT model shows that this model cannot make a good prediction using J −Δ a curve. On the basis of fitting procedure and numerical simulations, we have proposed a modification of this model by introducing corrective coefficients to improve the classical RT model. The proposed model, although very simple, is able to approximate with good accuracy the experimental results and that the approximation is, as expected, better than using the RT approach directly.