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U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Brittle-to-ductile transition in cleavage fracture: Progress report

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6566871

The basic direction of the research remains to be a dual approach combining an experimental investigation of the crack arrest temperatures in the cleavage fracture of samples of different crystal structure, with modeling of the crack tip dislocation emission process. The principal thesis is that a brittle cleavage to ductile behavior transition of fracture in intrinsically brittle solids is governed by crack tip processes that are controlled either by the energy barriers to the nucleation of dislocation loops from crack tips or the mobility of the nucleated dislocations away from the tip. It is anticipated that in a metallic material such as Fe 3% Si the process will be the former, while in Si it is already known that it is latter. The situation is unknown for intermetallic compounds such as Ni Ai which is also under investigation. In the remainder of this renewal proposal we start out by giving a brief progress report about both the experiments and the theoretical modeling research. This is followed by a brief program of proposed research.

Research Organization:
Massachusetts Inst. of Tech., Cambridge (USA). Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
DOE Contract Number:
FG02-87ER45294
OSTI ID:
6566871
Report Number(s):
DOE/ER/45294-T2; ON: TI89005737
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English