Experimental and Numerical Study of Combined High and Low Cycle Fatigue Performance of Low Alloy Steel and Engineering Application

Mechanical Properties of Low Carbon Alloy Steel with Consideration of Prior Fatigue and Plastic Damages

Mechanical properties, including the fatigue behavior of metals, are usually determined from damage-free specimens, but it is not well known how these properties change with respect to prior damages; hence, the present work aims to understand the remaining mechanical properties of low carbon alloy steel Q345q with pre-damages. Low-cycle fatigue tests on the damage free specimens, tensile tests on the low-cycle fatigue damaged specimens, and fatigue tests on the plastic deformed specimens were carried out, respectively. The low-cycle fatigue life prediction formula was proposed. The influences of different kinds of pre-damages on the residual mechanical properties were analyzed. Results show that the stable hysteretic loops in the low-cycle fatigue tests are well-stacked. The material illustrates Masing behavior, and it has a good energy dissipation capacity. The ductility of the low-cycle fatigue-damaged materials decreases significantly in comparison with the undamaged ones. The low-cycle fatigue lives of Q345q steel are almost unaffected, so long as the pre-applied tensile strain is lower than 10%.

An Approach for Predicting the Low-Cycle-Fatigue Crack Initiation Life of Ultrafine-Grained Aluminum Alloy Considering Inhomogeneous Deformation and Microscale Multiaxial Strain

In this paper, a low-cycle-fatigue (LCF) crack initiation life prediction approach that explicitly distinguishes nucleation and small crack propagation regimes is presented for ultrafine-grained (UFG) aluminum alloy by introducing two fatigue indicator parameters (FIPs) at the grain level. These two characterization parameters, the deformation inhomogeneity measured by the standard deviation of the dot product of normal stress and longitudinal strain and the microscale multiaxial strain considering the non-proportional cyclic additional hardening and mean strain effect, were proposed and respectively regarded as the driving forces for fatigue nucleation and small crack propagation. Then, the nucleation and small crack propagation lives were predicted by correlating these FIPs with statistical variables and cyclic J-integrals, respectively. By constructing a microstructure-based 3D polycrystalline finite element model with a free surface, a crystal plasticity finite element-based numerical simulation was carried out to quantify FIPs and clarify the role of crystallographic anisotropy in fatigue crack initiation. The numerical results reveal the following: (1) Nucleation is prone to occur on the surface of a material as a result of it having a higher inhomogeneous deformation than the interior of the material. (2) Compared with the experimental data, the LCF initiation life of UFG 6061 aluminum alloy could be predicted using the new parameters as FIPs. (3) The predicted results confirm the importance of considering the fatigue behavior of nucleation and small crack propagation with different deformation mechanisms for improving the fatigue crack initiation life prediction accuracy.