Application of the equivalent material concept to ductile failure prediction of blunt V-notches encountering moderate-scale yielding

The equivalent material concept, proposed originally by the first author for predicting tensile load-carrying capacity of ductile metallic materials weakened by V-notches, was employed together with two well-known brittle fracture criteria, namely the point-stress and the mean-stress criteria, to estimate theoretically the tensile load-carrying capacity of rectangular plates made of Al 7075-T6 and weakened by blunt V-notches encountering moderate-scale yielding at failure. With average discrepancies of 12.4 and 9.7%, it was found that both the equivalent material concept–point-stress and the equivalent material concept–mean-stress criteria could provide satisfactory predictions to the experimental results. Also, found in this research was that for large notch radii, the equivalent material concept–point-stress criterion could predict the test results better than the equivalent material concept–mean-stress criterion and vice versa.