Xiaokang Pan

and 2 more

Jafar Albinmousa

and 5 more

Magnesium and its alloys have increasingly gained attention among practitioners and engineers due to their attractive properties, specifically their high specific strength that renders these materials suitable for several applications in different industries. However, their use is still limited, especially in load-bearing applications, due to the limited knowledge of their fracture behavior, especially in the presence of notches. The aim of this work is thus that to fill this lack, investigating the fracture behavior of notched ZK60-T5 magnesium. Eleven different notch geometries were considered, i.e. U notched specimens with notch radii of 1.5, 3, 4, 5, and 6 mm and V notched specimens with notch opening angles of 35°, 60° and 90°, and notch radii of 0.4 and 0.8 mm. The mechanical tests showed that the presence of notches reduces the ductility of the material. This was confirmed also by the fracture surface analyses carried out by means of Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FE-SEM), where the size of the shear lips was shown to decrease by increasing the notch acuity. In addition, this work aims also to provide practitioners and engineers with a tool able to predict the failure loads irrespective of the notch geometry. For the first time on Mg samples, a local approach, i.e. the Strain Energy Density (SED), is used to predict the failure loads of the differently notched samples, and the results suggest high reliability of this approach, being the deviations between the experimental and the theoretical data often lower than 10%.