Abstract
As observed in the Hyogoken Nanbu Earthquake, brittle fracture is often triggered by preceding ductile fracture of steel members. The estimation of ultimate behaviors and deformation capacity of steel structures, therefore, critically depends on the ductile characteristics of its members. However, no reliable numerical method to investigate the ductile fracture of members is available because of the lack of the understandings of the quantitative aspects of such material characteristics. The objective of this work is to show a basic approach to a practical numerical analysis of ductile fracture. In the present work, we determined Gurson's model parameters using the proposed method to show that the FEM analysis with Gurson's model could be a suitable tool for the estimation of ductility limit of steel members.
