Numerical Analysis of Fatigue Life and strength of AA5052 Aluminum Alloy Reinforced with ZrO2, TiO2 and Al2O3 Nanoparticles

Abstract

In this study, the finite element method using ANSYS workbench 16.1 has been successfully used to predict the fatigue life, fatigue strength, and the factors of safety for the as cast AA5052 as arrow matrix and its composites: AA5052/7 wt% ZrO2, AA5052/7 wt% TiO2 and AA5052/7 wt% Al2O3. The Finite Element Analysis (FEA) model was building according to dimensions of the experimental fatigue specimen. The total number of elements was 504 elements with a total number of nodes of 2572 nodes. The numerical fatigue test was processed under static structural analysis, and it has been analyzed using fatigue tool on ANSYS, Goodman theory was used for the prediction of life. The FEM using ANSYS.16.1 workbench simulation showed a good agreement with the experimental results for all the stress life curves and the highest difference in fatigue life was 17% and the lowest was 1.4%, for ZrO2 composite, while the maximum overall average error was 2.031% for AA5052 and the lowest was 0.378%, for Al2O3 composite. The maximum difference about 4.14 % between the experimental and numerical fatigue strength at 107 cycles for the row matrix and less than for the composites, also the minimum factor of safety for the AA5052 alloy is 0.8327 and for AA5052/7 wt% ZrO2 composite is 1.0709 while for both AA5052/7wt%TiO2 and AA5052/7 wt% Al2O3 composites are 1.0707 at specific design life.