Redistribution of Welding Residual Stresses of Crack Tip Opening Displacement Specimen by Local Compression

The demand of crack tip opening displacement (CTOD) test which evaluates fracture toughness of a cracked material is very important to ensure the stability of structure under severe service environment. The validity of the CTOD test result is judged using several criterions of the specification standards. One of them is the artificially generated fatigue pre-crack length inside the specimen. For acceptable CTOD test results, fatigue pre-crack must have a reasonable sharp crack front. The propagation of fatigue crack started from the tip of the machined notch, which might have propagated irregularly due to residual stress field. To overcome this problem, test codes suggest local compression method, reversed bending method and stepwise high-R ratio method to reduce the disparity of residual stress distribution inside the specimen. In this paper, the relation between the degree of local compression and distribution of welding residual stress has been analyzed by finite element analyses in order to determine the amount of effective local compression of the test piece. Analysis results show that initial welding residual stress is dramatically varied three-dimensionally while cutting, notch machining and local compressing due to the change of internal restraint force. From the simulation result, the authors find that there is an optimum amount of local compression to modify regularly for generating fatigue pre-crack propagation. In the case of 0.5% compressions of the model width is the most effective for uniforming residual stress distribution.