NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF FRACTURE BEHAVIOUR OF CEMENTED CARBIDES
Cemented carbides are one of the most successful composite engineering materials ever produced. Their unique combination of strength, hardness and toughness satisfies the most demanding applications. These materials have a unique combination of high hardness and good toughness within a wide range and thus constitute the most versatile hard materials group for engineering and tooling applications. After the fracture tests on notched cemented carbide specimens have been conducted and the relevant properties at initiation determined according to linear elastic fracture mechanics, an appropriate numerical model needs to be developed for the calibration of cohesive laws in order to reproduce the obtained experimental results. Finite volume modelling of three-point bend tests was performed and numerical results obtained. The impact speed and measured material properties were provided as input parameters, and the cohesive strength for each grade of material was determined across the range of loading rates used in the experiments at room temperature. The numerical simulations were compared to the experimental data and very good agreement was obtained, where the computed force-time curves lie very close to the