ESTIMATION OF AXIAL FRETTING FATIGUE LIFE AT ELEVATED TEMPERATURES USING CRITICAL DISTANCE THEORY

Abstract

Fretting fatigue life is traditionally estimated by experiment. The objective of this work is to introduce a special approach for estimation of axial fretting fatigue life at elevated temperatures from plain fatigue test based on the critical distance theory. The method uses Fatemi–Socie parameter as a multiaxial criterion to compute the stress multiaxiality on focus path. This method considers only elastic behavior for materials, and two characteristic diagrams are obtained from plain fatigue tests on two U-shaped and V-shaped notched specimens. The results showed reasonable agreement between the predictions by the proposed method and the experiments for ambient temperature. For elevated temperatures, the results indicated that the predicted fretting fatigue life was considerably overestimated in the low cycle fatigue (LCF) regime and underestimated in the high cycle fatigue (HCF) region with respect to experimental measurements. The reason for such discrepancy is believed to be due to the complex behavior of AL 7075-T6, which exhibits at elevated temperatures because of the problems such as aging, oxidation and reduction of strength.