Fracture and Fatigue Behavior of Sintered Steel at Elevated

Temperatures: Part I. Fracture Toughness

ZHAOHUI SHAN and YANG LENG
This study investigates fracture resistance of a sintered steel in the temperature range from 25 8C to
300 8C. The temperature-dependent fracture resistance is experimentally determined by fracture
toughness tests. The fracture toughness, KIC, decreases from 28.8 at room temperature to
23 MPa!m at 300 8C. The finite element analysis shows an insight of the rationale of using KIC as
the parameter to characterize the fracture resistance of porous sintered steel in which the stress
intensity (K ) field has been severely distorted at the porous crack tip. The analysis indicates that
crack onset of sintered steel is controlled by a critical stress mechanism.

I. INTRODUCTION

THE distinguishing characteristic of sintered materials

is their porosity. Most sintered steels have a porosity in the
range 5 to 20 pct. Often, porosity has a dominant influence
upon the mechanical properties of the material.[18] Particularly, the fracture resistance and ductility of sintered steels
are not as good because of their porous nature. Cracks initiating from pores and propagating through the ligaments
between pores play significant roles in the fracture process
of sintered steels.[5,7,8] Temperature effects on fracture resistance of sintered steel, which have rarely been investigated,
might also differ from those of dense steels because of the
porous structure.
Porous structure inside powder metallurgy materials such
as sintered steel brings about the problem of using fracture
mechanics, a continuum mechanics, to describe the fracture
behavior, though fracture toughness, KIC, has been widely
used to characterize fracture behavior of powder metallurgy
materials. The effect of pores on the continuum mechanics
approach is puzzling. The simple approach is to treat a
porous material as a continuum one in which the effect of
pores is averaged throughout the material. Note that fracture
is a local behavior, sensitive to the crack tip environment
that is in the scale of microscopic features. Also, the essence
of fracture mechanics is the local stress/strain field, i.e., K
dominant field, in front of the crack tip. In this sense, the
averaging methods should never satisfy in understanding the
fracture toughness, KIC, of porous materials, such as the
sintered steel in which the pore size is comparable to the
scale of the K dominant field, and the spacing between pores
is about the same order as the plastic zone size.
Recognizing that most engineering materials are microscopically discontinuous in nature, the micromechanical
models of fracture toughness have been proposed to bridge
the macroscopic continuum and microscopic discontinuous
features of materials.[913] Such models try to rationalize
the correlation between fracture toughness and microscopic
fracture criterion. The critical stress model and the critical
ZHAOHUI SHAN, Research Associate, is with the School of Materials
Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
30332. YANG LENG, Associate Professor, is with the Department of
Mechanical Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Manuscript submitted June 2, 1998.
METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS TRANSACTIONS A

strain model are the most successful ones, of which the basic
concept relies on the fact that the crack onset occurs when
the stress or strain reaches a certain critical value at a certain
distance from the crack tip. The critical stress or strain, an
intrinsic property, is commonly related to tensile fracture
stress or ductility. The certain distance is determined by
the microscopic features of materials. The critical stress or
critical strain model might also provide the mechanisms
for understanding the apparent correlation between KIC and
fracture resistance of powder metallurgy materials.
The objectives of this article are to investigate the fracture
resistance of the sintered steel as a function of temperature
experimentally, and to study whether the critical stress or
the critical strain mechanism could also explain the apparent
validity of using KIC in the sintered steel by numerically
analyzing the stress/strain fields near the crack tip.
The numerical modeling of stress and strain fields near the
crack tip of solid with voids has been a research focus.[1419]
Previous finite element modeling studies were more concentrated on the void nearest to the crack and on the growth or
interaction of this void with the crack. Such studies mainly
focused on ductile fracture with large plastic deformation
in which void growth in front of a crack is critical to the
crack propagation process. Inspired by the previous studies,
in this article, we have adopted elastic-plastic finite element
modeling and also considered the certain features of porous
materials such as the not necessarily large deformation of
pores during fracture and the effects of pore spatial distributions on the fracture resistance.

II. EXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE

The sintered steel studied was a typical sintered steel used
for automobile parts (Fe-0.82 pct C to 1.9 pct Cu). Premixed
powders were compressed under a pressure of 415 MPa and
were subsequently sintered at 1085 8C to 1125 8C for 40
minutes in an endothermic atmosphere with a dew point of
21 8C. After sintering, the density of the sintered steel
specimens was 6.62 g/mm3. The corresponding volume fraction of porosity of the sintered steel was determined as
15 pct using a density method. The specimen geometry of
sintered steel was directly obtained from sintered processing.
Tensile test specimens of sintered steel were the dog-bone
tension (DBT) specimens with a cross section of 5 3 5 mm
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