Investigation of failure analysis on fatigue crack initiation influenced by critical resolved shear stress in X10CrMoVNb9-1 steel

Abstract

This study investigates the influences of the critical resolved shear stress (CRSS) values on calculating the number of cycles for the fatigue crack initiation cycle of X10CrMoVNb9-1 (P91) under cyclic loading conditions at room temperature while considering varied surface roughness on microstructure models. The micropillar compression test was utilized to calculate the CRSS values, incorporating the Schmid factor, the Frank–Read source together with the Hall–Petch effect, measuring the diameter of the micropillar after compression, and the Mlikota and Schmauder equation. Two primary microstructure surface roughness – plane surface roughness (PS) and surface roughness (SR) with an average of 1 µm – were generated using the Voronoi Tessellation (VT) method. Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations were conducted to identify different stress distributions across these artificial microstructures. These stress distributions were subsequently analyzed using the physics-based Tanaka-Mura model (TMM) to estimate the number of cycles for fatigue crack initiation at several stress amplitudes and six types of microstructure. The number of cycles varies significantly at lower stress amplitudes and convergence at higher stress amplitudes. The study of the CRSS of steel P91 offers a significant advancement in fatigue research, particularly with implications for power plants.