A special thank you to my colleague Lance Hill for his great work in this area. 

As part of our work in the area of ductile damage of metals, the 2012 Sandia Fracture Challenge presents a nice example that we can use to showcase both Abaqus material modeling capabilities, and capabilities of our calibration app in the 3DExperience Platform.

The summary paper for the 2012 Sandia Fracture Challenge,

Boyce, B.L., Kramer, S.L.B., Fang, H.E. et al. Int J Fract (2014) 186: 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10704-013-9904-6

was published as an "Open Access" paper by Springer and can be found here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10704-013-9904-6

Sandia National Laboratory tested tensile specimens of 15-5 PH, a precipitation hardened martensitic stainless steel, and challenged a set of participants to predict the tearing force-displacement curve and the crack propagation pattern in a specially fabricated compact tension specimen. By "specially fabricated", it simply means that a special arrangement of a blunt notch "A", and circular holes, B, C, and D were fabricated in each specimen.

For example, here is a nice animation of the tearing simulation created by my colleague, Lance Hill:

Lance also provided the two Abaqus Explicit input files that were used to generate the animation above.  The Sandia report noted how different specimens had different tearing patterns, and Lance showed in these analyses that this was due to the machining differences from specimen to specimen.  The Sandia report spoke to this issue, that is, some specimens were "in-spec" and others were "out-of-spec" when compared to the original specifications of the specimen geometry. 

MIT participated in the 2012 Sandia Fracture Challenge (team 13), some of their findings are given in the summary paper listed above, and a fuller paper was published, also Open Access.

Sandia Fracture Challenge: blind prediction and full calibration to enhance fracture predictability
Keunhwan Pack, · Meng Luo, ·Tomasz Wierzbicki

Tomasz Wierzbicki is a professor at MIT and he and his students have done tremendous work in the area of ductile damage of metals.  This paper is very good.

Another great reference paper is:  (though not connected to the Sandia Fracture Challenge)

Ductile failure analysis of API X65 pipes with notch-type defects using a local fracture criterion

Chang-Kyun Oh, Yun-Jae Kim,, Jong-Hyun Baek, Young-Pyo Kim, Woo-Sik Kim

Abaqus input files from Lance Hill:

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