Multiaxial mixed-mode cracking – small crack initiation and propagation*

Abstract

Abstract Both the fatigue crack path and fatigue life of CK45 steel and 42CrMo4 steel under various multiaxial loading paths are studied in this paper. The replica method was applied to monitor the crack initiation and small crack growth, the fractographic analyses were carried out on the fracture surface and the crack initiation angle was measured. The effects of non-proportional loading on both the crack path and fatigue life were studied, and the flattening of asperities on the crack surface due to compressive normal stress was also observed. An improved model is proposed based on correcting the strain range parameter of the ASME code approach, taking into account the additional hardening caused by the non-proportional loading path, which can improve the predictions of the fatigue lives for various non-proportional loading paths and provide an easy way to overcome the drawbacks of the current ASME code approach for non-proportional fatigue. Based on these corrected strain range parameters, a strain intensity factor range is used to correlate with the experimental results of small crack growth rates. It is concluded that the orientation of the early crack growth can be predicted well by the critical damage plane, but the fatigue life can not be predicted accurately using only the parameters on the critical plane, since the damage on all the planes contributes to fatigue damage as stated by the integral approaches.