Upper shelf energy normalisation for sub-sized Charpy-V specimens

When the plate thickness is less than 10 mm, testing with standard sized Charpy-V notch specimens is impossible. In such cases the testing must be based on sub-sized specimens. Sometimes, standard size specimens are impractical also for thicker sections. The use of sub-sized specimens requires extrapolation of the result from the sub-sized specimen to correspond to the result from a standard sized specimen. In this work, literature data combined with newly generated data were collected and examined in order to find the correct normalisation procedure for sub-sized specimen, upper shelf impact energy data. The resulting normalisation procedure, combined with a new Charpy-V-J–R curve correlation, was shown to produce realistic estimates of the materials upper shelf fracture toughness. In the case of materials showing pronounced splitting in the Charpy-V test, the estimates may be over-conservative.