An Energy-Critical Plane Based Fatigue Damage Approach for the Life Prediction of Metal Alloys

Abstract

This paper presents a new energy-critical plane based fatigue damage approach for the assessment of the fatigue life under uniaxial and multiaxial proportional and non-proportional fatigue loading. The proposed approximate method, based on Farahani's multiaxial fatigue damage model, takes into account the critical plane orientations during a loading cycle and the values of the respective damage parameters on them. The uniqueness of the proposed method lies on the fact that it considers a weighted contribution of each critical plane orientation to the material damage. The relative weighting factors depend on the declination of each critical plane with respect to the critical plane, where the damage parameters exhibit their maximum values during a fatigue loading cycle. Herein, several low, mid and high-cycle fatigue loading cases are being investigated. The induced elastic-plastic stress-strain states are approximated by means of respective finite element analyses (FEA). Several experimental fatigue data derived from uniaxial and multiaxial fatigue tests on StE460 steel alloy thin-walled hourglass-type specimens have been used to verify the model's calculation accuracy. Comparison of experimental and calculated fatigue lives confirm remarkable fatigue life calculation accuracy in all cases examined.