Intrinsic impact toughness of relatively high strength alloys

Although the Charpy impact test has been routine for decades to assess the ductile or brittle nature of materials, the impact toughness, which is strongly sample-thickness dependent, is not an intrinsic property. By re-examining the energy absorption during fracturing of relatively high strength alloys, here we find a remarkably good linear relation between the impact energies and the fracture surface areas of samples with different thickness, and the slope essentially renders the intrinsic impact toughness. The new findings, which also provide a scaling law to well predict the thickness effect on the traditional impact toughness, may have broad applications for precisely determining the ductile-to-brittle transition temperature of small-dimensional devices, selecting materials according to their toughness at the thickness in usage, and evaluating the intrinsic toughness of emerging high strength materials with limited achievable size.

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