Fatigue S.

N curves

Fatigue

Ni = ? Np = ? NT = ?

Metal Fatigue is a process which causes premature irreversible damage or failure of a component subjected to repeated loading.

Fatigue
A sequence of several, very complex phenomena encompassing several disciplines: motion of dislocations surface phenomena fracture mechanics stress analysis probability and statistics Begins as an consequence of reversed plastic deformation within a single crystallite but ultimately may cause the destruction of the entire component Influenced by a components environment Takes many forms: fatigue at notches rolling contact fatigue fretting fatigue corrosion fatigue creep-fatigue Fatigue is not cause of failure per se but leads to the final fracture event.

The Broad Field of Fracture Mechanics

Intrusions and Extrusions

Schematic of Fatigue Crack Initiation Subsequent Growth Corresponding and Transition From Mode II to Mode I

Locally, the crack grows in shear;

macroscopically it grows in tension.

The Process of Fatigue

The Materials Science Perspective: Cyclic slip, Fatigue crack initiation, Stage I fatigue crack growth, Stage II fatigue crack growth, Brittle fracture or ductile rupture

Appearance of Failure Surfaces Caused by Various Modes of Loading (SAE Handbook)

Fatigue in composite materials

Composite materials exhibit very complex failure mechanisms under static and fatigue loading because of anisotropic characteristics in their strength and stiffness. There are four basic failure mechanisms in composite materials as a result of fatigue: 1. Matrix cracking 2. Delamination 3. Fibre breakage 4. Interfacial debonding

 The different failure modes combined with the inherent anisotropies, complex stress fields, and overall non-linear behavior of composites severely limit our ability to understand the true nature of fatigue.

Typical Comparison of Metal and Composite Fatigue Damage

Comparison of Metal and Composite Stiffness Reduction

Conclusion: composite materials have better fatigue strength than metals

Fatigue models for composite materials

Existing fatigue models for composite materials can be classified into three categories:
1. fatigue life model (S-N curves) 2. residual strength or residual stiffness model 3. progressive damage model

The S-N curve

The basic method of presenting engineering fatigue data is by S-N curve. It is a plot of stress(S) against number of cycles to failure(N)

Fatigue cycles

Numerical Model of Fatigue Life Prediction

It is basically an S-N curve-based fatigue progressive damage model and ignores the detailed analysis of the local failure. It uses fatigue data from the family of S-N curves and uses a special damage variable to account for the multiaxial fatigue in each ply.

where max S and min S are the maximum and minimum cyclic stresses, R is the stress ratio, N is the fatigue life, and R A and R B are the strength coefficients

S-N curve example

The fatigue test data for balanced laminates using material D155 are chosen. The unidirectional S-N curve functions under stress ratio 0.1 are listed in table

Results

References
Fatigue Damage Modeling of Composite Laminates by Y.M. Liu and S. Mahadevan, 9th ASCE Conference on Probabilistic Mechanics and Structural Reliability (PMC2004) Mechanical metallurgy by George E.Dieter