Olivia Irene Sillics has faced death before; that's for certain. What happens when she meets this cute guy? Should she trust him? Maybe. Is everything he's saying true? Possibly. Will someone else find the light of God? Potentially. Will this be her demise or a brand-new beginning? Time to find out...

Model weldment fracture specimens have been fabricated, tested, and analyzed using finite elements. The specimens consist of an interleaf of commercially pure titanium diffusion-bonded to a harder alloy titanium. A deep edge crack is introduced symmetrically into the interleaf, and the specimens are loaded in pure bending. Variation of the thickness (2h) of the soft interleaf layer provides insight into effects of weld geometry in strongly undermatched weldments tested in plane strain bending. Ductile crack growth (beyond blunting) initiated at loads giving J ? 95 kJ/m2 in all specimens. In the thickest interleaf geometries, stable tearing was obtained, but in the thinnest interleaf (2h ? 3 mm), crack initiation resulted in a massive pop-in of 5.4 mm across an initial ligament of 12 mm. Finite element studies show that the thinnest interleaf geometry had slightly higher peak stress triaxiality at the beginning of cracking, and that the highest triaxiality extended over a larger region than in the thicker interleaf specimens loaded to the same initiation J-values. More importantly, the blockage of plastic straining above and below the crack tip in the 3 mm interleaf specimen forced higher values of plastic strain to spread forward into the ±45‡ sector of highest stress triaxiality directly ahead of the crack tip. The higher strains, in conjunction with the slightly higher stress triaxiality, led to the unstable pop-in initiation.