Abstract
Nowadays the demand for high strength steels is increasing. In order to design and develop high performance products, it is essential to understand the fatigue behavior of these materials. When considering welded components, the fatigue behavior is even more complex. The material parameters may change along the crack growth and mixed mode crack propagation may also occur. To assess welded high strength steel fatigue behavior, different welded CT specimens were tested. The Paris law material constants were obtained for the heat affected zone material. Fatigue crack growth life predictions were made using the obtained parameters and different automatic techniques. Previous work showed that the ABAQUS extended finite element method can predict fatigue crack growth, but as the implementation of the Paris law is not straight forward, to many conversions must be made and the results are too computer intensive. A simpler and more intuitive Python algorithm was developed, to enable the use of the experimental material parameters, to predict the crack propagation path. The obtain results show a good agreement with both the experimental Paris curves, and the analytical solution.
Highlights
A s the demand for high strength steels (HSS) increases, so does the necessity to assess the integrity of the various mechanical components produced with these materials
Qiang et al [2] showed that the mixed mode fatigue crack propagation of welded HSS is not clear, as the welded material has a better fatigue behavior justified by the more favorable microstructure
When using the XFEM technique the chosen mesh density was equal, but the mesh generation technique resulted in a lower number of elements overall, for the welded specimen
Summary
A s the demand for high strength steels (HSS) increases, so does the necessity to assess the integrity of the various mechanical components produced with these materials. Fatigue; Crack Propagation; Mixed Mode; Welded High Strength Steel. This algorithm can use any type of Finite Element Method (FEM) model to automatically calculate the Stress Intensity Factor (SIF) on the crack front and use the Paris Law to predict the elapsed number of cycles for a constant crack increment.
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