Issue 37

V. Anes et alii, Frattura ed Integrità Strutturale, 37 (2016) 124-130; DOI: 10.3221/IGF-ESIS.37.17 127 The loading sequence starts with a stress amplitude ratio equal to zero and evolves in the anticlockwise direction until reach again the starting position. This loading path was firstly described in [11] and is a variable amplitude loading that activates all loading planes with the same equivalent stress amplitude during the block loading, please see Fig. 1 c). Materials In this study two different materials were considered to analyze the performance of the SSF equivalent shear stress under variable amplitude loadings. They are the 1050QT high strength steel and the 304L stainless steel. The 1050QT steel is a quenched and tempered medium-carbon steel and is usually used in forged shafts and gears. The 304L stainless steel has its applications in chemical processing, pulp and paper mills and food industry. Tab. 1 shows the monotonic and cyclic properties of the 1050QT and 304L steels. In addition, in column 2, the 42CrMo4 mechanical properties are shown, the SSF damage map used in this study was obtained for this material. As one can see, the 42CrMo4 and 1050QT mechanical properties are very alike, this similarity suggests that the 42CrMo4 SSF damage map can be fairly used to estimate the 1050QT SSF damage map. 42CrMo4 1050QT 304L Young's modulus, E (GPa) 206 203 195 Yield strength, (MPa) 980 1009 208 Ultimate tensile strength, (MPa) 1100 1164 585 Fatigue strength coefficient, (MPa) 1154 1346 1287 Fatigue strength exponent -0.061 -0.062 -0.145 Table 1 : 42CrMo4, 1050 QT and 304L stainless steel mechanical properties [8, 11, 12]. Fatigue life Tab. 2 shows the stress levels of normal and shear stresses and their inherent fatigue life for the 1050QT steel and the 304L stainless steel. The fatigue life is shown in number of loading reversals. These experiments were performed under strain control and the failure condition was 20% drop in the testing stress level [11]. 1050QT 304L Sigma max [MPa] Tau max [MPa] 2Nf Sigma max [MPa] Tau max [MPa] 2Nf 724 413 3240 459 271 3960 751 432 4536 461 262 4176 632 374 29520 391 224 20160 620 364 64800 362 210 38160 Table 2: 1050QT and 304L fatigue life experimental results [11]. R ESULTS AND DISCUSSION ig. 2 a) shows the SSF equivalent shear stress time evolution for the FRI loading block. This example is for the 1050QT material and for the maximum values of normal and shear stresses equal to 724 MPa and 413 MPa, respectively. The SSF time evolution depicted in Fig. 2 a) has 360 fully reversed loading cycles with variable amplitude and lead to a fatigue life equal to 3240 reversals, (please see first row of Tab. 2). As it can be seen in Eq. (1), the maximum value found in the SSF time evolution is used, as a first iteration, to estimate the block fatigue life (i.e., the number of block repetitions before failure). In the second iteration, the first block fatigue life estimate (shown in Eq. (5) as max t N ) is updated with the virtual cycle counting computed for the FRI loading block using Eq. (4), please see Eq. (5). F