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Failure of steel structures: causes and remedies 7

BRITTLE FRACTURE

The theme of the meeting places the emphasis on heavy structures, and I
wonder whether this is meant to imply that heavy structures are necessarily
more prone to failure by the mechanisms so far considered than light ones. I
do not think that this is so. The real subject of this meeting is, of course, failure
by brittle fracture. However, I have seen a good many brittle fractures and more
of them in thin plate up to, say, 1 in. thick than in thick plate over 1 in., but this
may, of course, merely be the result of the fact that there are far more thin-walled
structures than thick ones. Brittle fracture, however, is not a problem peculiar
to heavy structures. During the war I saw a brittle fracture in the riveted bulkhead
of a destroyer only ½in. thick. It is, of course, undeniable that thicker plate is
generally less notch-tough than thin plate-presumably because thick notch-
tough plate is difficult to produce economically by present-day steel-making
practice-and that at a given operating temperature the risk of failure by brittle
fracture is greater in a thick plate than in a thin one, other things being equal.
While the whole field of brittle-fracture study is an interesting, fascinating and
rewarding one, the engineer is really concerned with only one aspect of it and this
is the elimination of the risk of fracture at normal service loads which would not-
except in areas of stress concentration-produce stresses exceeding conventional
permissible values. It has become customary to speak of such failures as have
occurred under the stresses of ordinary service conditions as 'low-stress brittle
fracture' as distinct from 'yield-point fractures' which can be readily produced at
suitable temperature in a Tipper test by loading the specimens to an average stress
equal or above the yield point, a stress level that could not possibly arise in a
structure.
Since discontinuities unavoidably introduced by essential design features will
give rise to stress concentrations, it is clear that there are areas of limited extent
in any structure where the stress will reach yield point magnitude whilst the per-
missible design stress is not exceeded anywhere remote from discontinuities. Can
brittle fracture occur as the result of such stress concentrations alone 1 I am not
sure whether we are as yet in a position to give a completely reliable answer
to this question. Whether a brittle fracture can occur seems to depend on the
maximum value of plastic strain that is produced at the most highly strained area,
and this would permit one to say that the closer the discontinuity approaches the
shape of a plane crack at right angles to the stress the higher will be the risk of
failure and the closer it approaches to a plane crack in the direction of the stress
the lower will be the probability of failure. We might in fact say that the point
where the crack initiates must have sustained a high degree of plastic strain
damage. This one would not expect to occur at strain concentration factors as
low as those introduced by normal and perhaps even abnormal design features.
At one time residual stresses due to welding were considered the sole cause of
brittle fracture. Some people went as far as to suggest that residual stresses owing
to their triaxial character embrittled the steel. Since then, low-stress brittle
fractures appear to have occurred in stress-relieved structures and low stress