Elastic-Plastic Thermomechanical Fatigue Analysis of Forging Dies

Abstract

Abrasive wear and low cycle fatigue (LCF) have the greatest influence on the durability of dies. This paper presents a new criterion for estimation of the LCF of forging dies. The deformation model of Manson-Coffin is the classic model for the calculation of LCF. The pulsating cycle of loading dies and the phenomenon of cyclic thermal softening doesn’t provide implementation of the full Manson-Coffin’s model for the analysis of the tool life. At the same time the majority of researchers do not take into account the plastic strain component for estimation the fatigue durability of the dies and use only elastic component of the Manson-Coffin’s law or model of Basquin that is based on the analysis of the stress cycle. The present work uses the strain-kinetic criterion to analyze the durability of the dies that allows taking into account the elastic-plastic strain components and thermos-cyclic softening. During loading in bulk forging the first cycle is to be with plastic deformation while all remaining cycles would have to remain within the elastic limit due to metal hardening. Moreover it has been shown that cyclic softening effect may also be observed in the thermomechanical fatigue. This approach has been implemented for LCF simulation of the die in hot forging in FE program QForm by introducing a special subroutine. The comparison of results of the die fatigue failure simulation has shown good correspondence with practice.