Abstract
The aim of this study is development of numerical method for the prediction for crack propagation of stainless steel plate under cryogenic temperature. Stainless steel is one of the most functional materials at relatively wide temperature ranges. It has strong non-linearities on the mechanical properties under cryogenic temperature such as discontinuous hardening phenomenon induced by the phase transformation, among others. The nonlinear hardening affects significant change of material characteristics, i.e., strength, deformation and fracture phenomenon. This induces some difficulties on the precise evaluation of structural capacity of stainless steel based structures. In the present paper, the crack propagation characteristics of the stainless steel plate under cryogenic temperature have been simulated using a new numerical technique based on a newly proposed damage-coupled constitutive model and orient-purpose user subroutine applicable to commercial FEA code ABAQUS. The numerical results are compared with the experimental results of tensile test and crack propagation tests under cryogenic temperature.