Determination of Local Tensile and Fatigue Properties With the Use of Sub-Sized Specimens

Determination of mechanical properties with the use of sub-sized specimens is very important topic nowadays. The use of sub-sized samples can be quite wide in all cases when limited amount of the experimental material is available such as evaluation of residual life of in-service components, properties determination of developed nano-structured materials, assessment of dilatometric samples used for thermal and thermo-mechanical treatment development, local properties of weld joints and so on. Concerning this large application field it would be very useful to prepare standard for small size samples especially for most demanded material properties: tensile properties, notch impact transition temperature, fatigue properties, fracture toughness and creep. One of the widely used methods of miniature sample testing is Small Punch Test (SPT) that is used for determination of all above mentioned properties. However the main drawback of this method is need of known correlation relation between considered property and SPT for the material of interest. The correlation is needed due to different loading mode in comparison between SPT and standard test methods. Unfortunately, transferability of these correlation parameters between labs is very limited and thus each lab has to determine its own that limits the use of this method. More interest is recently paid to development of small size samples procedures using miniaturized standardized samples maintaining big advantage — the same loading mode between small sized and full sized samples. The same loading mode significantly reduces or completely removes complexity of the results transfer from small to standard size samples. The current paper is dealing with overview of various applications of small sized tensile tests and fatigue tests. Concerning tensile tests quasi static tensile test at room temperature as well as at elevated temperature are show together with results of dynamic tests and special tests of metastable supercooled austenite. The developed procedures performance is demonstrated by comparison of standard size and sub-size specimens results comparison for all tests, except supercooled austenite tests, where no standard size specimen exists.