Cleavage fracture assessment for surface-cracked plates fabricated from high strength steels

•This study reports an experimental work on cleavage fracture for surface-cracked plates.•Direct assessments based on the Weibull stress remains infeasible for surface cracks.•The paper modifies the Weibull stress assessment for surface-cracked specimens.•This paper defines a critical crack-front segment based on the energy release rate.•This study verifies the proposed approach for three different steel materials.

This paper presents a combined experimental and numerical investigation to assess the probability of cleavage fracture for surface-cracked plates, using the Weibull stress framework. The proposed procedure defines a critical crack-front segment as the fracture initiation zone using the computed energy release rate. The Weibull-stress based local approach introduces a modified constraint correction function, which allows bidirectional scaling of the fracture toughness in surface-cracked specimens and the idealized 1T small-scale yielding condition. The proposed procedure predicts closely the probability of fracture for surface-cracked specimens made of three different types of steel materials.