A new model to simulate crack arrest behavior in steel plates used for naval structures

Recently, a concept called “Double Integrity” becomes more important because the cleavage fracture initiation likely occurs in severer environment and extremely thick steels. However, there are no valid explanation of the brittle crack propagation and arrest behavior in steel plates. The authors developed a numerical model to predict the crack arrest toughness based on the local fracture stress criterion by using a series of FEM analyses to evaluate the local stress in the vicinity of crack tip. Our model can evaluate the brittle arrested crack lengths about both of temperature gradient ESSO tests and wide duplex ESSO tests.