PP Periodica Polytechnica Fracture Toughness Evaluation of

Transportation Engineering
S355 Steel Using Circumferentially
Notched Round Bars
47(2), pp. 91-95, 2019
https://doi.org/10.3311/PPtr.11560
Creative Commons Attribution b Fatih Bozkurt1*, Eva Schmidová1

research article Received 12 March 2017; accepted 05 October 2017

Abstract 1 Introduction
In engineering applications, steels are commonly used Fracture is a problem that society has faced for as long as
in various areas. The mechanical members are exposed the man – made structures existed. Fracture mechanics is the
to different loading conditions and this subject can be branch of solid mechanics. This branch explains behaviour
investigated in fracture mechanics. Fracture toughness (KIC) of bodies having cracks under different loading conditions.
is the important material property for fracture mechanics. The reasons of most structural failures are negligence during
Determination of this properties is possible using a compact design, construction of the structure, application of new
tension specimen, a single edge notched bend or three-point design or material which produces an unexpected result. If
loaded bend specimen, which are standardized by different the structural member contains a crack, then the component
institutions. Researchers underline that these standardized becomes weak and finally fracture occurs. Fracture toughness
methods are complex, the manufacturing process is difficult, is the measure of resistance to crack propagation. Machines
they require special fixtures for loading during the experiment and structural, components are oversized in order to avoid
and the test procedures are time consuming. Alternative failure. This situation leads to the consumption of more
methods are always being sought by researchers. In this work, material than designed and thus a high price. The main reason
two different approaches are investigated for S355 steels. In for these problems is the non-availability of fracture toughness
the first method, a circumferentially cracked round bar was data. In this respect, the value of fracture toughness is useful in
loaded in tensile mode and pulled till failure. Using suitable designing machine or structural components which are strong
equations, fracture toughness can be calculated. In the second but not oversized and overly heavy.
method, a circumferentially notched bar specimen without Fracture toughness is measured in terms of KIC (plane strain
fatigue pre-cracking was loaded in a tensile machine. By means fracture toughness), where K stands for the stress intensity
of fracture load values, fracture toughness was determined by factor at the crack tip, “I” denotes the fracture toughness test
the proposed equations. It can be stated that these two different is performed in tensile mode and “C” denotes that value K is
approaches for calculating fracture toughness are simple, fast critical. When K attains a critical value crack propagation then
and economical. becomes unstable and results in fracture of the components
(Dieter, 1988). Generally, KIC is determined by different meth-
Keywords ods such as using a compact tension specimen, a single edge
fracture toughness, notched round bars, pre-cracked specimen notched bend or three-point loaded bend specimens. Some
institutions have proposed several fracture toughness measure-
ment methods, for example, the American Society for Testing
This article was originally published with an error. and Materials (ASTM Designation). But the proposed meth-
This version has been corrected/amended. Please see ods are difficult and also time consuming. Fast and reliable test
Corrigendum (https://doi.org/10.3311/PPtr.12579) methods are always being sought by researchers. In the liter-
ature, there are two different approaches to determining frac-
ture toughness of metallic materials. The first approach uses a
notched round bar that is allowed to rotate under fatigue load
1
Department of Mechanics, Materials and Machine Parts, in an R.R. Moore fatigue testing machine, then a pre-cracked
Jan Perner Transport Faculty, University of Pardubice, specimen is loaded in a tensile testing machine and pulled till
Pardubice, Studentská 95, Czech Republic failure. After that, crack lengths are measured with optical
*
Corresponding author, e-mail: [email protected] measuring devices and fracture toughness calculated using the

Fracture Toughness Evaluation of S355 Steel Using CNRB 2019 47 2 91

proposed equations (Londe et al., 2010; Londe et al., 2015). The round bar specimens were machined for the fatigue and
The second approach uses a notched round bar that is directly tensile tests. The dimensions of the specimens were: gauge
loaded in a tensile testing machine, and fracture toughness is cal- length 220mm (L0), diameter of notched section 10mm (d),
culated using suitable equations (Bayram et al., 2002;Bayram diameter of unnotched section 12mm (D), V-notch angle (α)
and Uguz, 1999; Bayram et al., 1999; Alaneme, 2011) and the 60° as shown in Fig. 2.
advantages of using circumferentially notched bars for fracture
toughness testing can be summarized as follows:
• The plane strain condition can be obtained;
• Because of radial symmetry of heat transfer, the micro-
structure of material along the circumferential area is
completely uniform;
• Machining and preparation of the specimens are easy;
• Performing of the fracture toughness test is simple; Fig. 2 Dimensions of round bar specimens

• Does not require any special fixtures to mount to speci-

men and costly instrumentation like clip gauge (Bayram For the pre-cracking procedure, the samples were subjected
et al., 2002 and Londe et al., 2015) to cyclic tensile – compressive loads of equal amplitude were
applied with the stress ratio R equal to minus one (R = –1).
In this work, two different approaches were examined for S355 Pre-cracking (shown in Fig. 3) was done at a suitable bending
steels and the results between the two methods were compared. load (M) using a four-point R.R. Moore rotating beam fatigue
testing machine (shown in Fig. 4).
2 Experimental Procedure
S355 steels are structural steels that are used extensively
in general engineering applications. They are particularly
useful because they offer a unique combination of good
welding properties with guaranteed strengths. The chemical
composition of the steel used for the tests is shown in Table 1.
No heat treatment was applied.
Fig. 3 Fatigue crack at notch tip
Table 1 Chemcial Composition of S355 (wt. %)
C Mn Si P S

0.2 1.82 0.27 0.012 0.003

Microstructure of S355 steel is shown in Fig. 1. It consists

equiaxed grains ferrite – pearlite microstructure. Lines shaped
micro volumes of pearlite is observed as a primary heterogene-
ity of carbon content.

Fig. 4 R.R. Moore rotating beam fatigue testing machine

The limit load selected was such that the maximum stress
intensity factor (Kmax) should not exceed 60% of the minimum
expected fracture toughness KIC of the test material. In the
present work, a 40kg mass was hung from the fatigue testing
machine. Three samples were subjected to the fatigue tests with
a differing number of cycles and then pre-cracked samples were
loaded monotically in tension with a crosshead displacement
Fig. 1 Microstructure of S355 steel rate of 0.5 mm/min until failure. The displacement was
measured using extensometer (Fig. 5).

92 Period. Polytech. Transp. Eng. F. Bozkurt, E. Schmidová

 Fig. 5 Mounted round bar specimen and extensometer Fig. 6 Electro – hydraulic test stand

For calculation of the fracture toughness value, crack lengths Fracture load which is maximum force can be read from data
of the fractured surface were examined by scanning electron acquisition for every specimen. The representative force – dis-
microscopy (SEM). The effective diameter (deff ) was calculated placement graph of the tensile test is shown in Fig 7. The most
by the sum of the machined notch depth (am) and the length of important parameters for this approach are the dimensions of
the fatigue pre-crack (af) as in Eq. (1) fractured surface of specimen after tensile test. The samples are
d eff = D − 2 ( am + a f cut and prepared for scanning electron microscopy. The machined
) (1)
notch depth (am) and the length of the fatigue pre-crack (af) are
Equation (1) is used for calculation of the fracture toughness measured circumferential direction of fractured surface (Fig. 8).
in Eq. (2) (Londe et al., 2015) where Pf is the fracture load, At least 4 points are measured and average values are calculated.
The fracture toughness values calculated using Eq. (2) from the
Pf   D  
K IC = × 1.72   − 1.27  (2) data of the tensile test on the circumferentially cracked round bar
D 3/ 2
 d 
 eff  (CCRB) specimens and also the dimensions of the fractured sur-
face (with SEM observations), fracture load, notched and unno-
The valid range for the use of Eq. (2) is 0.46 < deff / D < 0.86, tched dimension, are tabulated in Table 2.
where deff is the effective ligament diameter.
The second approach uses a notched round bar without
fatigue test that is directly loaded in a universal tension testing
machine. The term of the notched tensile strength (σNTS) is cal-
culated by Eq. (3) where Pf is the fracture load
4 × Pf
σ NTS = (3)
π ×d2

Eq. (3) is used for calculation of the fracture toughness in

Eq. (4) (Bayram et al., 2002) where Pf is the fracture load,
K IC = 0.454 × σ NTS × D1/ 2 (4)

Some researchers suggest using Eq. (5), which is same as Fig. 7 Representative force – displacement graph of the tensile test
Eq. (2) (Dieter, 1998), but in this formula the notched section
diameter is used instead of (deff ) for calculation of the fracture Table 2 Summary of Fracture Toughness Values and Dimensions
for CCRB specimen
toughness,
Pf  D  Sample
Pf kN
D
am mm af mm
deff
deff/D
KIC
K IC = × 1.72   − 1.27  (5) No mm mm MPa m
D 3/ 2
 d
  
S-1 46.6 11.9 0.99 0.67 8.58 0.72 40.4
3 Results S-2 47.6 11.8 0.98 0.5 8.84 0.74 38.13
During the experiments, an electro-hydraulic test stand was S-3 51.4 11.72 0.99 0.188 9.36 0.79 35.78
used for tensile testing in both approaches (Fig. 6).

Fracture Toughness Evaluation of S355 Steel Using CNRB 2019 47 2 93

 The fracture surfaces of un-precracked S355 sample is
shown in Fig. 9 in loading direction and perpendicular to the
loading direction (side view of the samples). The surface of
S355 steel has moderate amount of necking and it is almost
cup and cone fracture characteristics. In central region has an
irregular and fibrous appearance, which signifies plastic defor-
mation. In outer side of the fracture surface can be seen 45°
shear lips. This angle represents the direction of maximum
shear stress that causes shear lip in final stage.
The value of the fracture toughness difference between
Eq. (2) and Eq. (4) is about 3% and the difference between
Eq. (2) and Eq. (5) is about 4%. It can be stated that the results
of the method which uses notched bar specimens are more
consistent than the first method. In the literature, the fracture
toughness of structural steels (including low, medium and
high carbon steels) varies from 12 MPa m to 92 MPa m
. These values are calculated using standardized test methods
while some of them also concern heat treated steels, which
means that higher fracture toughness values can be achieved
(Materials Data Book, 2003).

Fig. 8 Representative force – displacement graph of the tensile

The fracture toughness (KIC) of S355 steel varies from 35.78

MPa m to 40.4 MPa m . The average fracture toughness
experimentally obtained is 38.1 MPa m .
According to the second approach, which uses notched bar
specimens without fatigue pre-cracking, the calculated fracture
toughness (KIC) varies from 39.4 MPa m to 39.9 MPa m
and the average value is 39.6 MPa m for Eq. (4). Because
the fracture toughness values were calculated by using the
fracture loads of the notched specimens, an increase in fracture
toughness with the increase in notch tensile strength is evident.
Fracture toughness was also calculated using Eq. (5) and in
this approach the values vary from 37.78 MPa m to 38.20
MPa m and the average value is 37.94 MPa m . Fracture
toughness, notch tensile strength and also dimension are
tabulated in Table 3. According to the results without pre-
cracked methodology, the calculated fracture toughness values
using Eq. (4) and Eq. (5) are in good agreement.

Table 3 Summary of Fracture Toughness Values and Dimensions

for Notched Bar Specimens
KIC KIC
Sample σNTS
Pf kN D mm d mm MPa m MPa m
No MPa
Eq. (4) Eq. (5)
S-4 58.19 11.58 9.58 807.3 39.4 37.78
S-5 59.88 11.68 9.68 813.7 39.9 38.20 Fig. 9 The fractured surface of un – precracked of the sample

S-6 58.71 11.62 9.62 807.7 39.5 37.85

94 Period. Polytech. Transp. Eng. F. Bozkurt, E. Schmidová

4 Conclusions References
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Acknowledgement
Crack Growth Rate Using Circumferentially Cracked Round Bar Specimens
This work was made possible with the support of the student of Al2014T651. Aerospace Sceince and Technology. 47, pp. 92–97
grant system of the University of Pardubice, project number https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ast.2015.09.023
SGS_2017_009. Materials Data Book (2003). Cambridge University Engineering Department.
[Online]. Available from: http://www-mdp.eng.cam.ac.uk/web/library/
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