An extension of the Equivalent Material Concept applied to fracture of U-notched solids

The Equivalent Material Concept is a tool that allows the fracture behavior of notched components in elastoplastic materials to be analyzed by transforming them into fictitious linear elastic ones, defining a fictitious failure stress. The combination of a failure criterion with this approach offers a methodology for predicting the maximum load of notched solids with elastoplastic behavior. The validity limits have been established experimentally by a logistic regression using fracture data of linear elastic, small scale yielding and fully plastic material. This paper also proposes an extension of the Equivalent Material Concept, applying the fictitious transformation in a more complete form to tensile, toughness and notch tests. New magnitudes as the fictitious stress, the fictitious toughness and the fictitious notch stress intensity factors have been defined. The final proposal is a partial application of the fictitious transformation that incorporates all of the experimental data gathered. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.