A simplified method for parameters calibration of the new local approach model for cleavage fracture in a ferritic steel

This work presents a simplified method for parameters calibration of the new local approach model (NLAM) for cleavage fracture in a ferritic steel. Based on the Beremin model, a NLAM was recently proposed by Lei (2016) to calculate the Weibull parameters. Although the above NLAM proves to be mathematically and physically self-consistent, yet there are still no reliable and convenient methods to calibrate the model parameters. Considering the plastic volume is determined by the threshold coefficient of fracture process zone lambda, we adopt four different values of lambda in this work to calculate the plastic volume so as to obtain four groups of calibrated Weibull parameters. The material used in this study is the pressure vessel steel 20MnMoNi55 with some published strength data under two subzero temperatures. And the finite element analysis FEA) software ABAQUS is employed to obtain the stress distributions, then the calibration results for four different values of lambda are compared and analyzed. These efforts show that taking lambda = 1.5 is a more reasonable and reliable choice.