AbstractThe ductile performance of high strength steel (HSS) from different steel grades, producers, manufacturing processes varies a lot. It is also difficult to conduct all kinds of reliable experiments to generate different stress status through different initial specimen geometries or by applying different load combinations in the civil engineering sector. One of the common issues for HSS structures is to identify the parameters of the ductile fracture model conveniently from the uniaxial stress–strain relationship obtained from common coupon specimens. An attempt is made in this paper to use the proposed mesoscale critical equivalent plastic strain (MCEPS) to calibrate the fracture locus of the uncoupled phenomenological model based only on the engineering stress–strain relationship. The proposed method is successfully validated by the Sandia fracture challenge in 2014.