Fracture toughness of high strength seamless pipe steel from SE(T) and SE(B) specimens evaluated by different standards

Recently released, BS 8571:2014 standard offers an alternative for the experimental determination of fracture toughness and resistance curves of metallic materials from SE(T) specimens. Similar in stress conditions and constraint to cracked tubes, specimens in SE(T) geometry should yield less conservative toughness values than conventional high-constraint specimens, such as SE(B) geometry. However, the convention to determine the J-integral fracture toughness proposed in the new BS standard is different from ASTM standards. In this work, SE(T) and SE(B) specimens of similar dimensions of a tough high-strength seamless pipe steel were tested following the BS 8571:2014 and ASTM E1820-16 standards, respectively. Because of the different standardized definitions, SE(T) specimens yield lower fracture toughness than SE(B) specimens, which could lead to more conservative results in structural integrity analysis. This investigation also suggests the introduction of the blunting line concept in the BS 8571:2014 standard in order to minimize this problem.