Modeling failure of Ti-6Al-4V using damage mechanics incorporating effects of anisotropy, rate and temperature on strength

In the context of lessons learned from the second Sandia Fracture Challenge summit and observed shortcomings in our blind predictions, we revisit finite-element-based failure modeling of the Ti-6Al-4V sample. Anisotropy, rate effects, and thermal softening are used to model strength; damage mechanics is used to model failure; a non-local approach is used to mitigate mesh-dependence of results. We obtain upper and lower bound force versus crack-opening displacement curves and the means of the quantities of interest are found to meet the requirement of being within 10 % of the experimental results, but the predictions of more intensive quantities such as principal strain and temperature in the ligaments of the challenge sample are > 10 %.