Comparative Study on Various Ductile Fracture Models for Marine Structural Steel EH36

Abstract

It is important to obtain reasonable predictions of the extent of the damage during maritime accidents such as ship collisions and groundings. Many fracture models based on different mechanical backgrounds have been proposed and can be used to estimate the extent of damage involving ductile fracture. The goal of this study was to compare the damage extents provided by some selected fracture models. Instead of performing a new series of material constant calibration tests, the fracture test results for the ship building steel EH36 obtained by Park et al. (2019) were used which included specimens with different geometries such as central hole, pure shear, and notched tensile specimens. The test results were compared with seven ductile fracture surfaces: Johnson-Cook, Cockcroft-Latham-Oh, Bai-Wierzbicki, Modified Mohr-Coulomb, Lou-Huh, Maximum shear stress, and Hosford-Coulomb. The linear damage accumulation law was applied to consider the effect of the loading path on each fracture surface. The Swift-Voce combined constitutive model was used to accurately define the flow stress in a large strain region. The reliability of these simulations was verified by the good agreement between the axial tension force elongation relations captured from the tests and simulations without fracture assignment. The material constants corresponding to each fracture surface were calibrated using an optimization technique with the minimized object function of the residual sum of errors between the simulated and predicted stress triaxiality and load angle parameter values to fracture initiation. The reliabilities of the calibrated material constants of B-W, MMC, L-H, and HC were the best, whereas there was a high residual sum of errors in the case of the MMS, C-L-O, and J-C models. The most accurate fracture predictions for the fracture specimens were made by the B-W, MMC, L-H, and HC models.