A J-INTEGRAL ANALYSIS OF CRACKS IN OVERMATCHED WELDED JOINTS

The effects of material inhomogeneity and weld width of the overmatched welded joints with alongitudinal crack or flaw upon the J-interal,a characterizing parameter for elastoplasticfracture,have been studied.The overmatched weld is idealized to be a parallelly cracked andsandwiched hard layer,the yieht stress of which is higher than that of the base metal.Numeri-cal solutions were obtained by using elastoplastic finite element method under the assumptionof plane stress.The resuits show that the values of J-integral are remarkably affected by thematerial inhomogeneity ant the weld width especially when the nominal stress or nominalstrain is comparatively high,which,therfore,should be taken into account when evaluatingthe crack driving force for an overmatched joint.