Abstract
Research funded by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in the 1980s produced a series of Ductile Fracture Handbooks including J-integral solutions for structural components with cracks. The EPRI Handbook series was to serve as an elastic-plastic equivalent to stress-intensity factor handbooks that various authors published in the 1970s. The original EPRI research in this area significantly advanced the field of elastic-plastic fracture mechanics (EPFM), particularly for ductile instability analysis of structures. However, the initial EPRI Handbooks were restricted to simple two-dimensional configurations, so were of limited practical value. Subsequent EPRI Handbooks published in the late 1980s contained numerous errors, and the technical basis of some solutions was not documented.
Advances in computing technology in the past four decades have now made EPRI’s original vision practical. A project is currently underway to produce a new EPRI EPFM Handbook. This project entails over 23,500 3D elastic-plastic finite element analyses of cracked configurations. The process of generating the meshes, editing the input files, running the FEA solver, postprocessing the results files, and fitting results to parametric equations is highly automated. Most computations are performed on an EPRI (Linux) cluster with 36, high-end nodes. New parametric equations for the J-integral, crack opening area (through-wall cracks), crack mouth opening displacement, and load-line displacement (laboratory specimen configurations) are developed in this study.
