3/12/22, 21:09 Comparative study of multiaxial fatigue damage models for ductile structural steels and brittle materials

ittle materials - ScienceDirect

International Journal of Fatigue

Volume 31, Issues 11–12, November–December 2009, Pages 1895-1906

Comparative study of multiaxial fatigue damage models for ductile

structural steels and brittle materials
B. Li, L. Reis, M. de Freitas

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Abstract

Fatigue damage prediction under a general multiaxial service loading consists of three main steps:
multiaxial cycle counting, damage evaluation for an identified cycle (or reversal), and damage
accumulations. The accuracy of fatigue life predictions depends on all the above steps. This paper reviews
the evolutions of various multiaxial fatigue damage models, a comparative study is conducted about the
physical basis, the computational efficiency, and the application range of the approaches. Based on the
comparative studies, a new procedure is proposed to evaluate fatigue damage under general multiaxial
random loading, which uses the Wang and Brown´s multiaxial cycle counting method for identifying
cycles (or reversals), the modified procedure of the minimum circumscribed ellipse (MCE) approach for
fatigue damage evaluation for an identified cycle (or reversal), and the Miner´s linear damage law for
fatigue damage accumulations. By comparisons of the predicted life results with experimental results and
with other approaches, it is shown that the proposed procedure is very efficient and suitable for computer
aided structural optimization against fatigue.

Introduction

Fatigue failure of mechanical components and structures under multiaxial loading conditions is a
common concern, since most engineering components are subjected to multiaxial cyclic stresses in service,
and the origins of multiaxiality are generally due to the external loading, the geometry or the residual

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stresses. In the literature, multiaxial fatigue stresses are classified as two types: proportional loading and
non-proportional loading [1]. In proportional loading, the components of stresses vary proportionally with
time, and the principal directions remain fixed. In non-proportional loading, the components of stresses
vary non-proportionally and the principal directions rotate with time and/or the ratios between principal
stresses vary with time. Under non-proportional multiaxial fatigue loading conditions, different cyclic
deformations (strain hardening or softening) and fatigue behaviors may be observed depending on the
material type.

In the literature, a lot of multiaxial fatigue models have been proposed as reviewed in [1], [2], [3], [4], which
may be categorized into five viewpoints, i.e. empirical formulas, application of stress or strain invariants,
the critical plane approaches, the integral approaches (space averages of stress or strain) and the energy
approaches [2]. A recent comparative study on the existing commercial software showed a large scatter of
calculated fatigue lives and on the unsafe side in most cases [5]. Therefore, it is still a challenge to evaluate
the fatigue damage under multiaxial service loadings.

Fatigue damage prediction under a general multiaxial random loading consists of three main steps:
multiaxial cycle counting, damage evaluation for a cycle, and damage accumulation, the accuracy of fatigue
life prediction depends on all the above steps [6]. The main problems with the current multiaxial fatigue
damage assessment are due to the fact that fatigue models were not selected correctly according to the
material type and many multiaxial fatigue models are too time consuming or too complicated for use
which requires the user to be a specialist in fatigue.

Up to now, most multiaxial fatigue studies were carried out in laboratories and multiaxial fatigue models
were developed for correlating the experimental results on the specimens, but a little study discussed the
application of the results obtained in laboratories to an actual design for structural components. Itoh et al.
[7] discussed the fatigue life assessment method for structural components subjected to proportional and
non-proportional low cycle fatigue loading. Recently, more research efforts have been attracted to develop
improved algorithms combined with the finite element method (FEM) for crack initiation life predictions
under service multiaxial loading conditions.

In this paper, a comparative study is conducted about the existing approaches for multiaxial cycle counting,
fatigue damage parameters and damage accumulations. Based on the comparative studies, a new procedure
is developed to evaluate fatigue damage under general multiaxial loading, which uses the Wang and Brown
´s multiaxial cycle counting method for identifying cycles (or reversals), the modified procedure of
minimum circumscribed ellipse (MCE) approach for fatigue damage evaluation for an identified cycle (or
reversal), and the Miner´s linear damage law for fatigue damage accumulations.

In the following sections, firstly the evolutions of the multiaxial cycle counting methods are briefly
reviewed and compared in Section 2, then different multiaxial fatigue models for brittle and ductile
materials are compared in Section 3, focus is on the ductile structural steels. The principles and algorithm
of various approaches for evaluating the effective shear stress/strain amplitude are discussed in Section 4,
and a modified implementation of the MCE approach is developed and the computational procedure is
presented in Section 5. Some examples of applications and comparisons with experimental results are
shown in Section 6. Conclusions are drawn in Section 7.

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Section snippets

Multiaxial cycle counting methods

For uniaxial tension/compression loading, the rain-flow method is popularly used for cycle (or reversal)
counting. But for multiaxial fatigue loading conditions, the rain-flow method can not be used directly. The
idea of most proposed multiaxial cycle counting methods is to map the multiaxial stress/strain histories to
a one-dimensional history, a so-called Counting Variable (CV), then the cycles (or reversals) of the CV can
be identified using a standard cycle counting method such as the…

Multiaxial fatigue damage parameters

In real service, different fatigue behaviors can be observed depending on the material type, the ductility-
dependent damaging mechanism needs to be considered. For ductile structural steels, significant
reductions in fatigue life under non-proportional multiaxial fatigue loading were observed. In contrast, an
increase in fatigue life is observed under non-proportional loading for brittle materials like cast
aluminum, cast iron and sintered steels [13].

There are also semi-ductile materials which …

Evaluation of the amplitude and mean values of shear stress/strain

In multiaxial fatigue damage assessments, one of the fundamental problems is to evaluate the effective
amplitude and mean values of the shear/normal stresses on a material plane. As shown in Fig. 1, during a
cycle of a complex periodic load, the stress Sn acting on a cutting plane in the material can be divided into a
normal stress component N and a shear stress vector C. The normal stress component N only changes in
magnitude, but there is no change in direction. So its amplitude and mean…

Implementation of the modified procedure of MCE approach

Computer aided fatigue damage evaluation of engineering components consist of two steps: dynamic stress
computation and fatigue life prediction. Dynamic loading histories can be obtained either from
experiments (mounting sensors or transducers on a physical component) or from computer simulation.
Then, fatigue life prediction is carried out as a post-processing step of finite element output results.

The algorithm of the modified procedure of MCE approach is developed on the stress-invariant…

Applications to biaxial axial/torsion stresses with sinusoidal waveforms

If the axial/torsion biaxial fatigue stresses are with the following sinusoidal waveforms:
The shear stress path on any material plane will be a
line or an ellipse depending on the phase shift angle, as shown in Fig. 7.

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It is shown that the shear stress path on any material plane is an ellipse, whereas the path of phase shift 0°
is a line, which can be considered as a special ellipse with the minor semi-axis Rb = 0.

By analytical solutions, the major…

Conclusions

To evaluate fatigue damage under complex multiaxial loading conditions, ductility-dependent damage
mechanism need to be considered, appropriate fatigue models should be selected and applied.

For brittle materials, the amplitude of the maximum normal stress/strain should be used as controlling
parameter for fatigue damage; for semi-ductile materials, the combinations of the amplitude of the
alternating shear stress τa with normal stress should be used as controlling parameter; For ductile…

Acknowledgment
Financial support of this work by FCT – Fundação para Ciência e Tecnología (Portuguese Foundation for
Science and Technology) is gratefully acknowledged.…

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