The Development of a Surface Crack in a Thick Vessel Under Ductile Tearing

The development of the shape and size of a flaw in a pressure vessel is important in fitness-for-service evaluations such as leak-before-break. In this work finite element modelling is used to evaluate the mean stresses and the J-integral around a front of a surface-breaking flaw. These results show non-uniform constraint levels and crack driving forces around the crack front at large deformation levels, which contrast those at low deformation levels. A new procedure is developed to estimate the amount of ductile crack extension around a surface-breaking crack on the basis of ductile tearing resistance curves of deep and shallow cracked fracture mechanics samples. The procedure is applied to surface flaws to simulate ductile crack extension under ductile tearing and show the evolution of the initial flaw shape. Results show that both, initially semi-circular and initially semi-elliptical flaws develop towards the same shape in bending.