An Experimental Study of Shear-Dominated Failure in the 2013 Sandia Fracture Challenge Specimen

This report presents an experimental study motivated by results obtained during the 2013 Sandia Fracture Challenge. The challenge involved A286 steel, shear-dominated compression specimens whose load-deflection response contained a load maximum fol- lowed by significant displacement under decreasing load, ending with a catastrophic fracture. Blind numerical simulations deviated from the experiments well before the maximum load and did not predict the failure displacement. A series of new tests were conducted on specimens machined from the original A286 steel stock to learn more about the deformation and failure processes in the specimen and potentially improve future numerical simulations. The study consisted of several uniaxial tension tests to explore anisotropy in the material, and a set of new tests on the compression speci- men. In some compression specimen tests, stereo digital image correlation (DIC) was used to measure the surface strain fields local to the region of interest. In others, the compression specimen was loaded to a given displacement prior to failure, unloaded, sectioned, and imaged under the microscope to determine when material damage first appeared and how it spread. The experiments brought the following observations to light. The tensile tests revealed that the plastic response of the material is anisotropic. DICmore » during the shear- dominated compression tests showed that all three in-plane surface strain components had maxima in the order of 50% at the maximum load. Sectioning of the specimens revealed no signs of material damage at the point where simulations deviated from the experiments. Cracks and other damage did start to form approximately when the max- imum load was reached, and they grew as the load decreased, eventually culminating in catastrophic failure of the specimens. In addition to the steel specimens, a similar study was carried out for aluminum 7075-T651 specimens. These specimens achieved much lower loads and displacements, and failure occurred very close to the maximum in the load-deflection response. No material damage was observed in these specimens, even when failure was imminent. In the future, we plan to use these experimental results to improve numerical simu- lations of the A286 steel experiments, and to improve plasticity and failure models for the Al 7075 stock. The ultimate goal of our efforts is to increase our confidence in the results of numerical simulations of elastic-plastic structural behavior and failure.« less