Capital University of Science

of Technology

Fatigue

By

Saad Bin Sarfraz

(BME143004)

M.Hassan Khan Lodhi

(BME143016)

Usman Umar

(BME143021)

M.Faizan Zafar

(BME143036)

Faizan Basharat

(BME143044)

Submitted to
Mr. Fareed Qureshi

CUST, Islamabad
May, 2016

Fatigue is the progressive and localized structural damage that results as a case when the material
is subjected to cyclic loading. Components may fail prematurely under cyclic loading (fatigue
fracture). Therefore, the behavior of materials under cyclic mechanical loading is an important
design criterion. Data required for fatigue life modeling are determined in laboratory tests . This
type of structural damage occurs when the experienced stress range is far below the static
material strength which means that the maximum stress values are less than the ultimate tensile
stress limit, and may be below the yield stress limit of the material. Fatigue failure occurs
without any plastic deformation which depicts that there is very little, if any, warning before
failure if the crack in not noticed. The number of cycles required to cause fatigue failure at a
particular peak stress is generally quite large, but it decreases as the stress if increased. The
greater the applied stress range, the shorter the life. A good example of fatigue failure is breaking
a thin steel rod with your hands by bending it back and forth several times.
The process until a component finally fails under repeated loading can be divided into three
stages:
1. During a large number of cycles, the damage develops on the microscopic level and
grows until a macroscopic crack is formed.
2. The macroscopic crack grows for each cycle until it reaches a critical length.
3. The cracked component breaks because it can no longer sustain the peak load.
For certain applications, the second stage cannot be observed. The term fatigue applies
mainly to the first stage.
Fatigue life is influenced by a number of factors such that temperature, presence of
oxidizing or inert chemicals, fretting etc. There are certain materials such as some
alloys of steel and titanium which exhibit a theoretical fatigue limit below which
continued loading does not lead to failure. Fatigue limit is usually defined at 10^7 or
10^8, cycles. Below this limit, it is assumed that material can endure infinite number of
cycles before failure.

Low cycle fatigue:

You are probably quite familiar with the type of fatigue that occurs when you bend, for example,
a paper-clip wire back and forth a few times until it breaks. This process is an example of lowcycle fatigue. In general, fatigue is the failure of a material, from repeated use or stress, at a
repeated stress value that is lower than that required for failure upon one exposure. Low-cycle
fatigue is so called because it occurs at stress repetitions NR < 103. Another class of fatigue is
termed high-cycle fatigue, and occurs for stress repetitions NR > 103. You may be familiar with
this sort of failure if you have experienced a catastrophic breakage of a chain, belt, or connecting
rod in an internal combustion engine. In other words, high-cycle fatigue occurs because of many
(on the order of 106) low-stress loadings. Low Cycle Fatigue(LCF) is mainly applicable for
short lived devices where large overloads may occur at low cycles. For LCF, the number of
cycles N 10^5. Stresses are close to or at the yield limit. Small stress increment is
responsible for large strain increment. The research of low cycle fatigue was done for pressure
vessels, power machinery that are exposed to heat source or sink which induce thermal stress
to the structure. Coffin-Manson relation for LCF IS:

where
is the amplitude of plastic strain.
is fatigue ductility coefficient defined by the strain intercept at 2N = 1. For common
metal materials,

N is the number of strain cycles to failure and 2N is the number of strain reversals to
failure.
c if called fatigue ductility exponent. For common metal materials, -0.7 < c < -0.5. A
smaller c value results in a longer fatigue life.

Low cycle fatigue LCF tests are characterized by high amplitudes with plastic deformation and a
number of cycles to fracture <104. Loading (uniaxial, tension-compression) can be strain or
stress controlled, fluctuating (only tensile or only compression) or alternating (in tension and
compression) at constant temperature. LCF tests require standardized sample machining
(geometry tolerances, surface quality), low bending grips and a constant testing temperature.
Strain is measured directly on the sample by high temperature extensometers, having ceramic
edges which detect the distortion in the parallel section of the specimen. Temperature is
measured by three thermocouples in the centre of the specimen as well as in the transition radii.
To check the testing system the Young's modulus is determined at room and at testing
temperature as well as the coefficient of thermal expansion. If these values meet the
requirements, mechanical load is applied to the specimen. Load is applied mainly strain
controlled with constant strain rate, sometimes with holding time. During the test, load, strain,
and temperature data, the load maximum and minimum is measured by time based data
acquisition (200 data per cycle). A real time data reduction reduces the data to a reasonable
amount. A representation of the data as max./min. stress vs. number of cycles provides important
information of an LCF test; e. g. the fatigue life (i. e. number of cycles to fracture) under the
chosen test parameters.

The stress vs. strain diagram shows a complete loading cycle at half fatigue life.

All LCF tests are conducted on servo hydraulic or electro mechanic testing machines. Heating is
realized preferentially by resistance furnace or for special applications (strain field measurement,
tests in vacuum) by inductive heating. In addition to axial tests, torsional or combined
axial/torsional loading is also possible.
LCF is the mode of material degradation when plastic strains are induced in an engine
component due to the service environment. The results of a typical LCF comparison are shown
in Figure

This LCF data was developed to determine the effects of an aggressive environment (such as
extreme heat, cold, etc.) on fatigue life. Fatigue test results in the aggressive environment (left
curve) were an order of magnitude lower than the baseline fatigue life tested in air (right curve).
For example, in a normal environment, under 120ksi alternating stress, Alloy A would fail at
about 10,000 cycles. In an aggressive environment, the same Alloy would fail at about 600
cycles.

LCF is characterized by high amplitude low frequency plastic strains. If we pull the beams of the
tuning fork apart until they are permanently bent we have imparted one half of an LCF cycle.
The act of permanently bending means that we have exceeded the elastic limit point on the stress
strain curve and have crossed over into the plastic region. Forcing the beams back into the
original position will require them to bent or "yielded" thereby completing one LCF cycle. The
tuning fork can endure only a very fe w of these cycles before it will fail due to LCF. In a turbine
blade these large strains occur in areas of stress concentration.

S-N Curve:
Engineering fatigue data is represented using the S-N curve. It is a plot of stress S against the
number

of

cycles,,

N.

If N 10^5 => Low Cycle Fatigue

If

>

10^5

=>

High

Cycle

Fatigue