Fracture Toughness Determination with the Use of Miniaturized Specimens

Fracture mechanics has been used for decades nowadays, and methods have been well established in the community especially for standard-sized specimens. As it was mainly developed for large structure assessment against the brittle failure, standardized specimens are of large size at present. However, in many cases, these standard specimens are not possible to apply due to size requirements of the available experimental material or the size of the component considered. These can be cases of residual service life assessment of in-service components, local properties determination (e.g., across weld), anisotropy determination and assessment of mechanical properties of newly developed materials under laboratory conditions (e.g., SPD processed materials, etc.). Therefore, development of new methods using significantly smaller specimens has to be carried out, and procedures using smaller-sized specimens together with their validity limits and relation to standardly obtained results have to be provided in order to provide solution for wide applications