Ductile fracture prediction of additive manufactured Ti6Al4V alloy based on an extended GTN damage model

Selective Laser Melting (SLM) is one of the revolutionary additive manufacturing (AM) technologies to produce metallic mechanical parts. To thoroughly understand the damage and fracture behavior of SLM-fabricated Ti6Al4V alloy under complex stress states, a number of tensile, compressive and torsional experiments covering various stress states were conducted with different types of the specimens. A modified GTN (Gurson-Tvergaard-Needleman) model with dual damage variables characterizing the void growth mechanism and void shear mechanism was adopted to describe and predict the ductile fracture behavior of the SLM-fabricated Ti6Al4V alloy under complex stress states. A new stress state-dependent function was introduced to extend the application of the model to negative stress triaxiality state. A finite element (FE) based inverse analysis strategy was proposed to calibrate the model parameters. The simulation results showed that the damage and fracture behavior of SLM-fabricated Ti6Al4V alloy can be well described by the modified GTN model. The morphologies of the fracture surfaces were successfully predicted by using the developed damage constitutive model, in which the variable of void fraction dominates fibrous zone failure based on the void growth mechanism, and the shear damage variable facilitates shear fracture based on the void shear mechanism.

Automated summary

Research has shown that the modified GTN model with dual damage variables can effectively describe the fracture behavior of SLM-fabricated Ti6Al4V alloy under complex stress states. By introducing a stress state-dependent function, the model's application has been extended, and a finite element based inverse analysis strategy has been proposed for parameter calibration.