Model for fracture mechanics based prediction of the fatigue strength of engineering alloys containing microscopical initial defects

Abstract

Recently two of the authors of the present paper proposed a model for fracture mechanics based prediction of the S-N characteristics of metallic components with large microstructural defects and supported this by a validation excercise on an aluminium alloy AL5380 H321. Within this presentation the authors extend the study using a number of data sets from the literature. Despite of necessary assumptions for the compensation of partially missing input information the results are fairly reasonable, with the exception of high loading levels where the analyses of two of the data sets yield non-conservative results. The authors propose multiple crack initiation as the potential root of the problem and discuss methods for extending the model for taking into account crack initiation.