Relation Between Front-Face and Load-Line Displacements on a C(T) Specimen by Elastic-Plastic Analysis

The use of miniature C(T) specimens makes it possible for the direct determination of the reference temperature of reactor pressure vessel steels, because they can be taken from the broken halves of the Charpy specimens used for surveillance program to monitor neutron irradiation embrittlement. Fracture toughness tests using C(T) specimens usually need the measurement of load-line displacement, however, it is difficult to mount a clip gauge inside the miniature specimen due to the limitation of the specimen size. A pair of knife edges is machined at the front face of the miniature C(T) specimen to mount a clip gauge with razor blade tips, and the front-face displacement is translated to the load-line displacement. When front-face displacement measurements are made, the load-line displacement can be inferred by multiplying the measured values by the constant 0.73. This conversion factor has been simply derived from the assumption of the linear deformation around a supposed point of rotation. In this study, the conversion factor was directly evaluated by using a three-dimensional elastic-plastic finite element analysis for the miniature C(T) specimens, and the adequacy of the conversion factor was investigated.