Claude Bathias

Fatigue of materials and structures : application to design and damage

Fatigue of Structures and Materials: Schijve, J ... The design of mechanical structures with predictable and improved durability cannot be achieved without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of fatigue damage and more specifically the relationships between the microstructure of materials and their fatigue properties. Written by leading researchers in the field, this book, along with the complementary books Fatigue of Materials

Gigacycle fatigue of bearing steels

Abstract For a practical point of view, the bearing steels are loaded up to the very high cycle fatigue regime, in service, far away from the Wöhler regime. In the present paper, several approaches are discussed in order to open some ways of investigation, in the range of 109 cycles: accelerated fatigue testing, thermal dissipation, fish-eye formation, inclusion effect, short crack propagation and stability of the microstructure.

Gigacycle Fatigue Properties of Bearing Steels

The concept of a fatigue limit at 106 cycles that was introduced by Wohler in 1850 seems nowadays to be the wrong magnitude when considering the fatigue life of modern industrial applications such as automotive engines that run typically billions of cycles. The necessity to increase performances in terms of lifetime and safety in steel fabricated products remains an issue, although testing is becoming more time consuming and costly with current design products. It is the aim of our research to develop better understanding of fatigue properties of steels in the gigacycle domain. One way to approach this is to use a piezoelectric fatigue testing system working at ultrasonic frequency. This paper will describe the research done on several 52100 steels coming from Europe (NF100C6) and Japan (SUJ2). Different heat treatments have been applied to obtain different microstructures: Martensite and bainite with and without residual austenite. The fatigue tests, up to 1011 cycles, have been carried out using piezoelectric machines working at 20 and 30 kHz under tension-compression, tension-tension, and torsion only. A set of specimens has been tested also with a circular notch to observe the effect of stress concentration. Finally the thermal dissipation during testing has been determined using an infrared camera. It is confirmed that the influence of inclusions is a key problem.

Crack path in aeronautical titanium alloy under ultrasonic torsion loading

This paper discusses features of fatigue crack initiation and growth in aeronautical VT3-1 titanium alloy under pure torsion loading in gigacycle regime. Two materials: extruded and forged VT3-1 titanium alloys were studied. Torsion fatigue tests were performed up to fatigue life of 109 cycles. The results of the torsion tests were compared with previously obtained results under fully reversed axial loading on the same alloys. It has been shown that independently on production process as surface as well subsurface crack initiation may appear under ultrasonic torsion loading despite the maximum stress amplitude located at the specimen surface. In the case of surface crack initiation, a scenario of crack initiation and growth is similar to HCF regime except an additional possibility for internal crack branching. In the case of subsurface crack, the initiation site is located below the specimen surface (about 200 µm) and is not clearly related to any material flaw. Internal crack initiation is produced by shear stress in maximum shear plane and early crack growth is in Mode II. Crack branching is limited in the case of internal crack initiation compared to surface one. A typical ‘fish-eye’ crack can be observed at the torsion fracture surface, but mechanism of crack initiation seems not to be the same than under axial fatigue loading.

Investigations on the Fatigue Crack Propagation Threshold in Very High Cycle Fatigue

Pariss law of fatigue crack propagation rate is well applied in the defect-tolerance fatigue approach. When carry out same approach in the very high cycle fatigue domain, the understanding of mechanism about fatigue crack propagation threshold which is obviously important, is helped. In the present work here, the fatigue crack propagation threshold of a surface crack for an Armco iron loaded in the VHCF regime was investigated by a new approach which combines the fracture surface analysis and the temperature recording on the surface during the test by an infra-red camera. The experiments were carried out on a sheet specimen under a 20 kHz ultrasonic frequency loading with IR images registration. Three stages of fatigue crack were identified with different mechanisms. It is found that the transition between initiation and crack propagation corresponds to the intrinsic fatigue threshold. It takes more than 99% of the gigacycle fatigue life to achieve this transition size.

Relation between the Mechanical Behaviour of a High Strength Steel and the Microstructure in Gigacycle Fatigue

Many components can reach or exceed 109 cycles in their service time. When fatigue life is beyond 106, the Wöhler S-N curve was always considered to be asymptotic in horizontal axis, but the fatigue behaviour over 106 cycles can not be neglected. It is not usual to carry out a fatigue test beyond 109 cycles due to the conventional fatigue test’s constraints, time consuming and expensive. High strength steel is widely applied in automobile, railway industry after surface treatment in order to improve performance of material in practice. Carburizing process hardens surface to increase wear and fatigue resistance and shot peening has a beneficial effect on the material fatigue strength from the surface residual compressive stresses. A piezoelectric gigacycle fatigue machine is used to do the tests in gigacycle regime on specimens with different surface treatments. The effect of different surface treatments is investigated in gigacycle regime at a frequency of 20KHz with a fixed stress ratio R=0.1 at room temperature. Moreover, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) observations of fracture surfaces are analyzed to evaluate the mechanism of damage related to surface treatments, microstructure scored inclusion size. The role of inclusions and microstructure is emphasized at 109 cycles.

Effect of low cycle fatigue pre-damage on very high cycle fatigue

Carbon-manganese steel is often applied in components of pipes in nuclear plant. Ultrasonic fatigue tests following low cycle fatigue (LCF) cycles damaged are used to study the strength of very high cycle fatigure (VHCF). The comparison of test results of simple VHCF and cumulative fatigue (LCF plus VHCF) shows that LCF load influences the following VHCF strength. Continuum damage mechanics model is extended to VHCF region. The effect of LCF load on VHCF is studied by an improved cumulative damage model.

Very High Cycle Fatigue Analysis of High Strength Steel with Corrosion Pitting

This work deals with very high cycle fatigue tests on high strength steel subject to the corrosive action of salt solution. Tests were carried out at constant load ratio R = -1 on corrosion treated and non-treated specimens and sea water flow specimens of R5 steel, which according to an International Classification Society of offshore systems is steel graded with the highest ultimate tensile strength to manufacture mooring chains and accessories intended to position mooring applications such as mooring of mobile offshore units, mooring of floating production units and mooring of offshore loading systems. Fatigue endurance on pre-corroded specimens was quite dispersed but with a mean value of 360 MPa, whereas for the non corroded specimens the fatigue endurance was located between 420 MPa at 105 - 106 cycles, and 380 MPa at 109 cycles. Concerning the sea water flow specimens, important increase in fatigue life is observed in reducing the applied load. Dispersion on fatigue endurance for the pre-corroded and sea water flow specimens was related to the complex process of corrosion on the specimen surface; nevertheless, the resulting pitting holes were associated to fracture origin in these specimens. Furthermore, fatigue failure origin was systematically localized at a circular, elliptical or irregular surface pitting hole formed during the corrosion process; special attention was focused on the pitting holes related to fatigue failure. Finite element results were obtained for the hemispherical voids placed on the specimen surface in order to determine the corresponding stress concentration; these results were associated with the real fracture origin pitting holes observed on specimens with pre-corrosion and sea water flow corrosion. Finally, some conclusions were obtained concerning pitting holes, stress concentration and fatigue life for the pre-corroded and sea water flow corroded specimens.

Very high cycle fatigue strength and crack growth of thin steel sheets

For basic observations or for industrial applications it is of interest to use flat specimens at very high frequency in the gigacycle regime. In this work, thin flat sheet, with 1.2 mm thickness of a complex phase ferrite-martensitic steels were considered for carrying out fatigue tests at high frequency (20 kHz) up to the gigacycle regime (>109 cycles). The crack initiation tests were carried out with water cooling, while the crack growth test were carried out in laboratory air at room temperature. All the tests were carried out under loading ratio R=-1. To do that, special designs of specimens were made and computed using FEM for defining the stress amplitude for endurance tests. Special attachments for specimens to the ultrasonic system’s horn were enhanced. A particular FEM computing of the stress intensity range on crack growth specimens was carried out for determining the specimen dimensions and an equation that defines the stress intensity range as a function of the harmonic displacement amplitude, dynamic Young’s modulus, material density and crack length. Detailed procedures and fatigue results are presented in this paper.

Energy Dissipation in Very High Cycle Fatigue for Polycrystalline Pure Copper and Armco Iron

This paper aims at a deeper understanding of microplastic mechanisms leading to crack initiation in ductile metals in Very High Cycle Fatigue (VHCF). Fatigue tests were conducted using an ultrasonic technique at loading frequency of 20 kHz. The microplastic mechanisms are revealed via observations of slip markings at the specimen surface and self-heating measurements due to intrinsic dissipation. Pure copper and Armco iron (which contains a very low amount of carbon) were investigated. Both are single-phase ductile materials but the crystallographic structure of copper is face-centered cubic while it is body centered cubic for Armco iron. A good correlation was found between slip markings initiation and dissipation for both materials. The dissipation for both materials is of the same order of magnitude but the location, the morphology and the evolution over cycles of slip markings were found different.