Prehistory effects on the VHCF behaviour of engineering metallic materials with different strengthening mechanisms

Abstract

Engineering materials often undergo a plastic deformation during manufacturing, hence the effect of a predeformation on the subsequent fatigue behaviour has to be considered. The effect of a prestrain on the microstructure is strongly influenced by the strengthening mechanism. Different mechanisms are relevant in the materials applied in this study: a solid-solution hardened and a precipitation-hardened nickel-base alloy and a martensite-forming metastable austenitic steel. Prehistory effects become very important, when fatigue failure at very high number of cycles (N > 107) is considered, since damage mechanisms occur different to those observed in the range of conventional fatigue limit. With the global strain amplitude being well below the static elastic limit, only inhomogeneously distributed local plastic deformation takes place in the very high cycle fatigue (VHCF) region. The dislocation motion during cyclic loading thus depends on the effective flow stress, which is defined by the global cyclic stress-strain relation and the local stress distribution as a consequence of the interaction between dislocations and precipitates, grain boundaries, martensite phases and micro-notches. As a consequence, no significant prehistory effect was observed for the VHCF behaviour of the solid-solution hardening alloy, while the precipitation-hardening alloy shows a perceptible prehistory dependence. In the case of the austenitic steel, strain-hardening and the volume fraction of the deformation-induced martensite dominate the fatigue behaviour.