Crack-dominated failure mode

Failure analysis can be related to potential crack growth behavior to prevent fracture. Fracture is a crack-dominated failure mode. For fracture to occur, a crack must somehow be created, then initiate, and finally propagates. The prevention of any of these events will prevent fracture. Cracks can be considered elastic discontinuities that can come from a variety of sources such as internal voids or dirt, and/or surface scratch, embrittlement, or weld line. Cracks can be consequences of faulty design, poor processing, and/or poor handling of raw material, assuming material arrived clean (Figure 7.6). 

Fracture process in multidirectional composite laminates subjected to in-plane static or fatigue tensile loading involves sequential accumulation of damage in the form of matrix cracks that appear parallel to the fibres in the off-axis plies, edge delamination and local delamination long before catastrophic failure. These resin dominated failure modes significantly reduce the laminate stiffness and are detrimental to its strength. 

Some agglomerates of different materials have been observed to fail because of internal flaws driven by a number of stresses (e.g., internal tensile stress cracks in the surface plastic flow at the surface between the agglomerate and platen and shear stress within the sphere). For brittle particle agglomerates with significant internal flaws, the tensile strength is small compared to the compressive and shear strength, and failure is likely initiated by the internal tensile stress. In any case, a careful microscopic examination of failed pieces can provide much information on the dominant failure mode (Bika et al., 2001). 

Valve failure is the dominant failure mode for reciprocating compressors. Because of their high cyclic rate, which exceeds 80 million cycles per year, inlet and discharge valves tend to work harder and crack. 

The simulations in this paper give failure modes sequences very similar to the actual ones observed in the experiments. The model predicts the formation of shear-dominated inter-layer (or interfacial) cracks that initiate first and that such cracks grow very dynamically, their speeds and shear nature being enhanced by the large wave mismatch between the core and the face sheet. The triggering of the complex mechanism of the intra-layer failure of the core structure is also well reproduced. 

The three attrition mechanisms are in turn governed by different failure modes brittle, semibrittle, and ductile (Ghadiri, 1997). Brittle failure occurs when internal or surface cracks already exist and is dominant at low elastic deformation at the powder contact surface (Shipway and Hutchings, 1993). Semibrittle failure, at limited plastic deformation, is responsible for flaw initiation and occurs when the impact forces surpass the yield point. In fact, median and radial cracks cause particle fragmentation, and lateral cracks cause chipping. Soft materials are usually ductile and the mechanisms for particulate solids under ductile mode have not yet been elucidated (Ghadiri, 1997). 

The HTGCR vessel failure mode is moving more towards flexural criteria than shear criteria. The initiation and propagation of cracks and their positions are very different. The reason is purely the dominant role that the barrel wall/ cap slenderness ratio has played in producing flexural cracks. In plan around the boiler and circulator penetrations and in the standpipe area, most of the plastic zones are identical. 

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