A novel method of predicting the multiaxial high-cycle fatigue strength of metallic components is proposed and verified for various steel, aluminium and cast iron alloys. The proposed Fatigue Damage Function shows superior multiaxial fatigue strength prediction compared to the established methods of Gough and Pollard, McDiarmid and Carpinteri and Spagnoli. A new material property, the Normal Stress Sensitivity Factor, is also introduced and its applicability is verified according to published test results of sixteen different structural alloys. To highlight the effectiveness of the proposed criterion, for industrial applications, a case study has been conducted on heat-treated and not heat-treated automatic transmission output shafts.

Fatigue, or failure of material due to repeated cyclic loading, is one of the most common causes of mechanical failures. The risk of fatigue in a load carrying component is often lowered by adding material, thereby reducing stresses. This increases the component weight, reducing the performance of the component and increasing its manufacturing cost. There is thus a need to design components to be as light as possible, while keeping the risk of fatigue at a low enough level, i.e. there is a need for optimization of the component subject to fatigue constraints.  This thesis deals with design against fatigue using topology optimization, which is a form of structural optimization where an optimal design is sought by using mathematical programming to decide which parts of a design domain should be filled with material, and which should not.  To predict fatigue, accurate representation of the geometry and accurate stress computation are of utmost importance. In this thesis, methods for imposing constraints such as minimum inner radii and minimum member sizes in the form of four new density filters are proposed. The filters are able to generate a very sharp representation of the structural boundary. A method for improving the accuracy of stress results at the structural boundary is also proposed, based on extrapolation of results from the interior of the structure. The method gives more accurate stresses, which affects the resulting structures when solving optimization problems.  A formulation for fatigue constraints in topology optimization is proposed, based on the weakest link integral. The formulation avoids the problem of choosing between accurate but costly local constraints, and efficient but approximate aggregated constraints, and gives a theoretical motivation for using expressions similar to the p-norm of stresses.  For verifying calculations of the fatigue probability of an optimized structure, critical plane criteria are commonly used. A new method for evaluating such criteria using optimization methods is proposed, and is proved to give results within a user given error tolerance. It is shown that compared to existing brute force methods, the proposed method evaluates significantly fewer planes in the search of the critical one. / <p>QC 20150504</p>

abstract: A new critical plane-energy model is proposed in this thesis for multiaxial fatigue life prediction of homogeneous and heterogeneous materials. Brief review of existing methods, especially on the critical plane-based and energy-based methods, are given first. Special focus is on one critical plane approach which has been shown to work for both brittle and ductile metals. The key idea is to automatically change the critical plane orientation with respect to different materials and stress states. One potential drawback of the developed model is that it needs an empirical calibration parameter for non-proportional multiaxial loadings since only the strain terms are used and the out-of-phase hardening cannot be considered. The energy-based model using the critical plane concept is proposed with help of the Mroz-Garud hardening rule to explicitly include the effect of non-proportional hardening under fatigue cyclic loadings. Thus, the empirical calibration for non-proportional loading is not needed since the out-of-phase hardening is naturally included in the stress calculation. The model predictions are compared with experimental data from open literature and it is shown the proposed model can work for both proportional and non-proportional loadings without the empirical calibration. Next, the model is extended for the fatigue analysis of heterogeneous materials integrating with finite element method. Fatigue crack initiation of representative volume of heterogeneous materials is analyzed using the developed critical plane-energy model and special focus is on the microstructure effect on the multiaxial fatigue life predictions. Several conclusions and future work is drawn based on the proposed study. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Mechanical Engineering 2016

<p>In this licentiate thesis the work done in the project KME410 will be presented. The overall objective of this project is to evaluate and develop tools for designing against fatigue in single-crystal nickel-base superalloys in gas turbines. Experiments have been done on single-crystal nickel-base superalloy specimens in order to investigate the mechanical behaviour of the material. The constitutive behaviour has been modelled and verified by simulations of the experiments. Furthermore, the  microstructural degradation during long-time ageing has been investigated with  respect to the component’s yield limit. The effect has been included in the  constitutive model by lowering the resulting yield limit. Finally, the fatigue crack  initiation of a component has been analysed and modelled by using a critical plane approach.</p><p>This thesis is divided into three parts. In the first part the theoretical framework, based upon continuum mechanics, crystal plasticity and the critical plane approach, is derived. This framework is then used in the second part, which consists of three included papers. Finally, in the third part, details are presented of the used  numerical procedures.</p>

In this licentiate thesis the work done in the project KME410 will be presented. The overall objective of this project is to evaluate and develop tools for designing against fatigue in single-crystal nickel-base superalloys in gas turbines. Experiments have been done on single-crystal nickel-base superalloy specimens in order to investigate the mechanical behaviour of the material. The constitutive behaviour has been modelled and verified by simulations of the experiments. Furthermore, the  microstructural degradation during long-time ageing has been investigated with  respect to the component’s yield limit. The effect has been included in the  constitutive model by lowering the resulting yield limit. Finally, the fatigue crack  initiation of a component has been analysed and modelled by using a critical plane approach. This thesis is divided into three parts. In the first part the theoretical framework, based upon continuum mechanics, crystal plasticity and the critical plane approach, is derived. This framework is then used in the second part, which consists of three included papers. Finally, in the third part, details are presented of the used  numerical procedures.

In this dissertation the work done in the projects KME-410/502 will be presented.The overall objective in these projects is to evaluate and develop tools for designingagainst fatigue in single-crystal nickel-base superalloys in gas turbines. Experimentshave been done on single-crystal nickel-base superalloy specimens in order toinvestigate the mechanical and fatigue behaviour of the material. The constitutivebehaviour has been modelled and veried by FE-simulations of the experiments.Furthermore, the microstructural degradation during long-time ageing has been investigatedwith respect to the material's yield limit. The eect has been includedin the constitutive model by lowering the resulting yield limit. Moreover, the fatiguecrack initiation of a component has been analysed and modelled by using acritical plane approach in combination with a critical distance method. Finally, asan application, the derived single-crystal model was applied to all the individualgrains in a coarse grained specimen to predict the dispersion in fatigue crack initiationlife depending on random grain distributions. This thesis is divided into three parts. In the rst part the theoretical framework,based upon continuum mechanics, crystal plasticity, the critical plane approachand the critical distance method, is derived. This framework is then used in thesecond part, which consists of six included papers. Finally, in the third part, detailsof the used numerical procedures are presented.

This dissertation aims to study the benefit of rail grinding on service life of railroad rails, focusing on failures due to rolling contact fatigue (RCF) at the rail head. Assuming a tangent rail with one-point contact at the running surface, a finite element analysis of a full-scale wheel-rail rolling contact with a nonlinear isotropic kinematic hardening material model is performed to simulate the accumulation of residual stresses and strains in the rail head. Using rolling stress and strain results from the sixth loading cycle, in which residual stresses and strains are at their steady-state, as input, two critical plane fatigue criteria are proposed for fatigue analyses. The first fatigue criterion is the stress-based approach—namely the Findley fatigue criterion. It suggests an important role of tensile residual stresses on subsurface crack nucleation and early growth in the rail head, but applications of the criterion to the near-running-surface region are limited because of plastic deformation from wheel-rail contact. The second fatigue criterion is the strain-based approach—namely the Fatemi-Socie fatigue criterion. Contributed mainly from shear strain amplitudes and factorized by normal stress components, the criterion also predicts fatigue crack nucleation at the subsurface as a possible failure mode as well as fatigue crack nucleation at the near-surface, while maintaining its validity in both regions. A collection of fatigue test data of various types of rail steel from literature is analyzed to determine a relationship between fatigue damages and number of cycles to failure. Considering a set of wheel loads with their corresponding number of rolling passage as a loading unit (LU), optimizations of grinding schedules with genetic algorithm (GA) show that fatigue life of rail increases by varying amount when compared against that from the no-grinding case. Results show that the proposed grinding schedules, optimized with the exploratory and local-search genetic algorithms, can increase fatigue life of rail by 240 percent. The optimization framework is designed to be able to determine a set of optimal grinding schedules for different types of rail steel and different contact configurations, i.e. two-point contact occurred when cornering.

No description available.

No description available.

[pt] Uma relação direta onde a vida em fadiga Número de ciclos por falha pode ser descrita como função das amplitudes macroscópicas de tensão normal e cisalhante, Amplitude de tensão normal macroscópica e Amplitude macroscópica da tensão de cisalhamento, é obtida. Utilizando o critério de Carpinteri e Spagnoli (CeS) como uma ferramenta de inspeção, foram obtidas curvas de nível elípticas sobre um domínio Amplitude de tensão normal macroscópica x Amplitude macroscópica da tensão de cisalhamento. A expressão das curvas de nível obtidas foi generalizada, proporcionando uma ferramenta capaz de prever o número de ciclos para falha associado a qualquer combinação (Amplitude de tensão normal macroscópica, Amplitude macroscópica da tensão de cisalhamento). As previsões obtidas através do método da curva elíptica foram comparadas às observações experimentais, bem como a previsões obtidas a partir de versões adaptadas de modelos consagrados na literatura, a saber: Findley (F), Matake (M), McDiarmid (McD), Susmel e Lazzarin (SeL), Carpinteri e Spagnoli (CeS) e Papadopoulos (P). O modelo proposto forneceu previsões em boa concordância com as observações experimentais, e sua capacidade de avaliar o comportamento em fadiga se revelou o melhor dentro todos os critérios considerados. Por fim, uma leve tendência conservadora do modelo foi atenuada através da introdução de um parâmetro de ajuste, melhorando ainda mais sua capacidade de avaliação de comportamento em fadiga. / [en] A direct relation where fatigue life Number of cycles to failure can be determined as function of macroscopic normal and shear stress amplitudes Macroscopic normal stress amplitude and Macroscopic shear stress amplitude is established. Using the Carpinteri and Spagnoli (CandS) criterion as a survey tool, elliptical level curves in the Macroscopic normal stress amplitude x Macroscopic shear stress amplitude domain were revealed and further generalised, providing means to determine the number of cycles to failure for any given (Macroscopic normal stress amplitude, Macroscopic shear stress amplitude ) combination. Predictions obtained through the elliptical curve method (E) were compared to experimental observations, as well as to predictions obtained from adapted versions of popular fatigue criteria, namely Findley (F), Matake (M), McDiarmid (McD), Susmel and Lazzarin (SandL), Carpinteri and Spagnoli (CandS) and Papadopoulos (P). The proposed model delivered predictions in fair agreement with experimental observations and its predictive capability was seen to be the best among all the considered criteria. Finally, a slight bias towards conservativeness was attenuated with the introduction of an adjusting parameter, further improving the predictive capability of the model.