Assessment of steel wire’s fatigue life using finite elements modelling and experimental testing

Abstract

Various applications consist of wire rope as one of their most important construction parts. Wire ropes formed of three parts as basis; wires, strands and core. to get a deep understanding of wire ropes and their mechanical properties, it is essential to study their main part; the wire. For this reason, steel wire has been studied in this work to get its fatigue life as the number of cycles to failure using finite element modeling. FEM results have been verified using experiments; Flex tester machine and fatigue apparatus which is created and structured for this study. Outcomes have proved that using of bigger bending diameters resulted in increasing the fatigue life of the steel wire and vice versa. It is noticed that the FEM results have small and reasonable value of deviation comparing to the experimental results. Other mechanical properties of the steel wire have been obtained from FEM such as; equivalent Von-Mises stress, equivalent elastic strain, equivalent plastic strain and equivalent total strain.