Abstract
Our engineered metallic materials are being designed to be more and more ductile with an increase in strength. Consequently, the failure mode has changed – from brittle to ductile fracture, which leads to a limited applicability of the previously used parameters that quantify the material resistance developed for brittle fracture. This is owing to that a considerable amount of plastic strain is introduced to the fracture process. Shear-dominated ductile fracture failure is commonly observed in many of the structural metals. In the current work, a novel measure Omega Ω is proposed, which fundamentally describes the material s ability to motivate relative mass motion in response to Mode Ι shear-dominated fracture propagation. The effects of specimen geometry, fracture tip constraint and deformation modes on Ω were discussed and analysed, which inspired the ideas of normalisation approaches that lead to the development of a dimensionless parameter Normalised Omega Ω¯. A