| Summary: | Margins in defect assessment procedures such as BS 7910 and R6/4 have been examined for cleavage and ductile tearing from complex and re-characterised defects. A range of crack profiles with re-entrant sectors developed from two co-planar surface breaking defects by fatigue has been examined experimentally and numerically. Both studies show enhanced crack driving forces in the re-entrant sector combined with a loss of crack tip constraint. Cleavage failures from complex and re-characterised defects demonstrated that the re-characterisation procedure is not conservative when cleavage occurs at small fractions of the limit load. Failures close to the limit load benefit from constraint loss which counteract the amplified crack driving forces in re-entrant sectors and cause re-characterised defects to be more detrimental than the original complex defects. Benefit may be taken from statistical size effects, which are strongly dependent on the crack geometry. Experimental fatigue and ductile tearing studies show similar development of complex cracks towards the re-characterised shape and re-characterisation procedures, such as those given in BS 7910 and R6/4, are conservative for fatigue and ductile tearing. A procedure has been developed to quantify enhanced temperature margins due to constraint loss by comparing the self similar stress fields at a critical local fracture stress (the Ritchie-Knott-Rice approach) and through the Weibull stress. Agreement with the experimental data has been demonstrated and the temperature dependence of the material parameters has been discussed. Following Li (1997) and Karstensen (1996), a toughness mapping technique was discussed that allows mode I toughness to be translated into mixed-mode I+II toughness for stress controlled fracture. In support of the arguments, toughness of Mode I and mixed-mode I+II configurations was measured on a mild steel. The experimental data clearly show increased cleavage toughness for unconstrained mode I and mixed-mode fields and the correlation with the predictions from the numerical models was demonstrated.
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